Missed us live at our new weekly livestream home on YouTube at 3PM ET last Thursday? Fret not, because we've got you covered here with the video and audio recordings as usual. So, listen on your own time as Tim, Brian and Peter talk everything from OUYA to Angry Birds hand sanitizer. Stream it below, or catch the subscription links and video embed after the break. Happy weekend!
Ireland's press regulations, which include an ombudsman and a council of publishers, public citizens, and journalists, are less restrictive than the proposed British version.
By Jason Walsh,?Correspondent / March 27, 2013
A man collects a copy of a newspaper at a newsstand in London, Oct. 2010. Could Ireland's model of an official Press Council and ombudsman work in Britain?
Ian West/AP/File
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With the British government moving ahead on a new media regulator and the UK press in revolt against, some in the country wonder if their neighbors to the west could offer a solution. Could Ireland's model of an official Press Council and ombudsman work in Britain?
Skip to next paragraph Jason Walsh
Ireland Correspondent
Jason Walsh has been the Monitor's Ireland correspondent since 2009, dividing his time primarily between Belfast, Northern Ireland and?Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. During that time he has reported on stumbling blocks in the peace process, the dissident republican threat,?pro-British unionist riots, demands for abortion legislation and Ireland's economic crash.
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Set up by the newspaper industry in response to a government threat to introduce privacy legislation, the 13-member Press Council includes representatives of publishers, members of the public (the appointments are publicly advertised), and one from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), the leading journalists' union in Britain and Ireland.
Publications that are members, including all of the national newspapers, agree to be bound by its code of conduct, and to recognize the decisions of the council and ombudsman. Membership in the council is not mandatory, but publications that are members are generally subject to lesser damages in the event of successful court actions against them, as a result of the council and ombudsman being "recognized in statute."
The ombudsman, currently?John Horgan, a former Labor party politician and journalism professor, adjudicates on complaints from subjects of newspaper stories, and if agreement cannot be found between all parties involved, he can make a ruling or refer the complaint to the Press Council for a final decision.
Seamus Dooley, the Irish secretary of the NUJ, says regulation has not been proscriptive.
The Press Council's code of conduct is more carrot than stick, and starts with a full-throated defense of a free press, saying: "The freedom to publish is vital to the right of the people to be informed. This freedom includes the right of a newspaper to publish what it?considers to be news, without fear or favour, and the right to comment upon it."
It goes on, however, to detail what the Press Council sees as the correct way for publications to operate, although the tone is more aspirational than condemnatory. For example, retractions must be printed in a prominent place and ordinary members of the public are entitled to privacy.
"We're quite happy with the way it's going," says retired business journalist Martin Fitzpatrick, NUJ's appointee to the Irish Press Council. "We've never had a hugely contentious press. There is a degree of timidity, and you could fault them for not foreseeing the onset of the financial crisis, but that's not down to regulation."
The high opinion of press regulation is not universally held, however, even in the NUJ's Irish ranks.
"[British] newspapers did horrible things, but they also uncovered horrible things that were done. The effect of regulation will not be the protection of people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves at the center of press attention, it will be the protection of the rich and powerful," says Gerard Cunningham, chairman of the NUJ's freelance branch in Ireland.
(Could Ireland's regulation work in Britain? British papers rebel as UK press regulation moves closer to reality)
Mr. Cunningham, who formerly worked in the US, says the culture of the British press is, for demonstrable reasons, comparable to other countries only in very general terms.
"This is about all about competition," he says. "Maybe The New York Times and, to a lesser extent, The Christian Science Monitor have a national reach, but they're not really competing against a regional metro daily," he says.
This situation with each US metro market having a dominant player is in stark contrast with Britain, where 11 national dailies, a clutch of regional newspapers, a few specialist titles, and an independent national Scottish press all slug it out for the same pound.
"The British market is intensely competitive and they try to break every story. They really do publish and be damned," says Cunningham.
In contrast, a staggering 19 daily papers are available on the newsstands nationwide in Ireland, though nine of these are rarely read imports from the US and UK and three more are regional titles from Northern Ireland. Of the seven popular national newspapers in Ireland, two tabloids are "Celtified" editions of British newspapers and two more are hybrids of British and Irish material. All four are members of the Press Council, though their British equivalents object to press regulation.
Having a regulated press hasn't stopped the Irish government from indicating it may seek further powers, though. In February 2012, the publication by the Irish Daily Star of candid photographs of Britain's Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, prompted Irish Justice Minister Alan Shatter to consider enacting new, stricter privacy legislation. The government has yet to do so, however.
This photo provided by the Nevada Highway Patrol shows Jean Soriano, 18, who was booked into the Clark County Detention Center after he was treated and released at University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Soriano has been arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in a southern Nevada crash that killed five members of a California family and injured the suspect and three other people. (AP Photo/Nevada Highway Patrol)
This photo provided by the Nevada Highway Patrol shows Jean Soriano, 18, who was booked into the Clark County Detention Center after he was treated and released at University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Soriano has been arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in a southern Nevada crash that killed five members of a California family and injured the suspect and three other people. (AP Photo/Nevada Highway Patrol)
Five members of a Southern California family were killed Saturday when their van was rear-ended by an 18-year-old driver who was later arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, authorities said.
The dead were among seven family members who were in the van, authorities said. The other two ? the 40-year-old female driver and a 15-year-old boy ? were hospitalized in critical condition.
Jean Soriano of California was booked into the Clark County Detention Center after he was treated and released at University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Loy Hixson said.
The crash happened at about 3 a.m. on Interstate 15 near the Utah line. Soriano's sport utility vehicle struck the van from behind, causing both vehicles to spin out of control and roll near Mesquite, some 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, investigators said.
A 23-year-old passenger in Soriano's SUV was treated at the hospital and released.
Authorities believe Soriano was returning from a visit with family in Utah to his home in California at the time of the wreck, Hixson said. They didn't immediately release his hometown or the names or hometowns of the victims.
Beer bottles were found in the SUV, Hixson said, and troopers performed a blood-alcohol test on Soriano at the hospital. The results won't be known for a couple of weeks, he said.
Hixson said only two of the seven people in the van were wearing seatbelts. The five who were not buckled in were ejected, but one survived.
"Unfortunately, so many in the van weren't wearing seatbelts, and some might have survived had they been wearing them," Hixson said. "We see it so many times where people can survive simply by having a seatbelt on."
The van was carrying a couple, their children and some aunts and uncles, he said. Killed were three men in their 40s, a teenage female and an adult female.
Mar. 29, 2013 ? While pearl millet is a major food staple in some of the fastest growing regions on Earth, relatively little is known about the drought-hardy grain.
Recently, plant geneticists at the University of Georgia successfully isolated the gene that creates dwarfed varieties of pearl millet. It is the first time a gene controlling an important agronomic trait has been isolated in the pearl millet genome. Their work appeared in the March edition of the journal G3: Genes, Genomics, Genetics.
The dwarf varieties are economically important in the U.S., India and Africa, in particular.
The researchers, led by UGA's Katrien Devos, also were able to trace the dwarf gene to plants bred 50 years ago by Glenn Burton, a UGA plant breeder who worked on the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences' Tifton campus.
Knowing which gene controls the dwarfing trait will help plant breeders create more efficient, sustainable varieties of millet that have the short stature some farmers and ranchers want.
"Knowing the actual gene that reduces plant height has allowed us to develop markers that can be used by breeders to screen for the presence of the gene long before the effects of the gene can be visually observed," said Devos, a professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences' Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics, housed in the department of crop and soil sciences, and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences' department of plant biology.
"In the longer term, the knowledge gained in pearl millet will help to develop semi-dwarf lines with high agronomic performance in other cereal crops," she said.
Rajiv K. Parvathaneni, a doctoral student working in Devos' lab, was in charge of tracking down the gene, which works by controlling the flow of the growth hormone auxin through the plant.
He also wanted to understand the mechanism by which the gene controls auxin and to develop plant-breeder-friendly markers that would allow breeders to screen for the dwarfing gene before their plants matured.
The gene that Parvathaneni found affects the downward transport of auxin, which is made in the top part of the plant. If this gene is on, the auxin flows freely, and millet will grow to its full height, about 10 feet. If it is off, the millet plant may only grow to be 3 to 5 feet in height.
Parvathaneni and Devos' team first found which region of the pearl millet's genome contributed to growth and then compared that section to a similar section of DNA from sorghum. Sorghum is a grain related to pearl millet, and a complete map of its genome recently was released by Devos' UGA colleague Andy Patterson.
The comparison revealed that ABCB1, a gene controlling auxin transport and causing reduced plant height in sorghum, was the prime gene candidate controlling pearl millet dwarf stature, Devos said.
Comparative genome analysis, a process in which an unmapped genome is compared to the genome of a similar and more thoroughly described plant genome, is a common method to help identify the functions of specific genes, especially in crops for which little genetic resources are available.
The next step for Devos' team is to work with researchers in other states to understand more fully how auxin transport differs in tall and dwarf millet plants and to verify that ABCB1 is in fact the gene that controls dwarfism.
After Devos and Parvathaneni located the dwarfing gene, they tested pearl millet dwarfs from around the world. All dwarfs caused by a nonfunctional ABCB1 gene have the same mutation as the dwarfs that were first bred by Burton in the 1960s.
Dwarf varieties of pearl millet are not ideal for every planting situation. In Africa, many farmers prefer taller varieties because they use the long stalks for roofing thatch and other applications.
However, where millet is intensively cultivated, dwarf millet allows farmers to harvest the grain with mechanical threshers. Ranchers like dwarf millet as a forage plant because it has a high leaf-to-stem ratio, Devos said.
Knowing more about the plant in general is key to broadening production of the very drought-resistant, hardy grain.
"The crop itself has a future, a bright one-especially in regions where climate change may lead to more erratic rainfall patterns as pearl millet is highly drought tolerant. It already is a popular food crop in semi-arid regions of India and Africa and will likely gain interest from drought-prone regions of the developed world as an alternative to corn in animal feed," Parvathaneni said.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Georgia. The original article was written by J. Merritt Melancon.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
R. K. Parvathaneni, V. Jakkula, F. K. Padi, S. Faure, N. Nagarajappa, A. C. Pontaroli, X. Wu, J. L. Bennetzen, K. M. Devos. Fine-Mapping and Identification of a Candidate Gene Underlying the d2 Dwarfing Phenotype in Pearl Millet, Cenchrus americanus (L.) Morrone. G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, 2013; 3 (3): 563 DOI: 10.1534/g3.113.005587
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
ATLANTA (AP) ? Juwanna Guffie was sitting in her fifth-grade classroom taking a standardized test when, authorities say, the teacher came around offering information and asking the students to rewrite their answers. Juwanna rejected the help.
"I don't want your answers, I want to take my own test," Juwanna told her teacher, according to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard.
On Friday, Juwanna ? now 14 ? watched as Fulton County prosecutors announced that a grand jury had indicted the Atlanta Public Schools' ex-superintendent and nearly three dozen other former administrators, teachers, principals and other educators of charges arising from a standardized test cheating scandal that rocked the system.
Former Superintendent Beverly Hall faces charges including conspiracy, making false statements and theft because prosecutors said some of the bonuses she received were tied to falsified scores. Hall retired just days before the findings of a state probe were released in mid-2011. A nationally known educator who was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009, Hall has long denied knowing about the cheating or ordering it.
During a news conference Friday, Howard highlighted the case of Juwanna and another student, saying they demonstrated "the plight of many children" in the Atlanta school system.
Their stories were among many that investigators heard in hundreds of interviews with school administrators, staff, parents and students during a 21-month-long investigation.
According to Howard, Juwanna said that when she declined her teacher's offer, the teacher responded that she was just trying to help her students. Her class ended up getting some of the highest scores in the school and won a trophy for their work. Juwanna felt guilty but didn't tell anyone about her class' cheating because she was afraid of retaliation and feared her teacher would lose her job.
She eventually told her sister and later told the district attorney's investigators. Still confident in her ability to take a test on her own, Juwanna got the highest reading score on a standardized test this year.
The other student cited by Howard was a third-grader who failed a benchmark exam and received the worst score in her reading class in 2006. The girl was held back, yet when she took a separate assessment test not long afterward, she passed with flying colors.
Howard said the girl's mother, Justina Collins, knew something was wrong, but was told by school officials that the child simply was a good test-taker. The girl is now in ninth grade, reading at a fifth-grade level.
"I have a 15-year-old now who is behind in achieving her goal of becoming what she wants to be when she graduates. It's been hard trying to help her catch up," Collins said at the news conference.
The allegations date back to 2005. In addition to Hall, 34 other former school system employees were indicted. Four were high-level administrators, six were principals, two were assistant principals, six were testing coordinators and 14 were teachers. A school improvement specialist and a school secretary were also indicted.
Howard didn't directly answer a question about whether prosecutors believe Hall led the conspiracy.
"What we're saying is, is that without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree that it took place. Because as we know, this took place in 58 of the Atlanta Public Schools. And it would not have taken place if her actions had not made that possible," the prosecutor said.
Richard Deane, an attorney for Hall, told The New York Times that Hall continues to deny the charges and expects to be vindicated. Deane said the defense was making arrangements for bond.
"We note that as far as has been disclosed, despite the thousands of interviews that were reportedly done by the governor's investigators and others, not a single person reported that Dr. Hall participated in or directed them to cheat on the C.R.C.T.," he said later in a statement provided to the Times.
The tests were the key measure the state used to determine whether it met the federal No Child Left Behind law. Schools with good test scores get extra federal dollars to spend in the classroom or on teacher bonuses.
It wasn't immediately clear how much bonus money Hall received. Howard did not say and the amount wasn't mentioned in the indictment.
"Those results were caused by cheating. ... And the money that she received, we are alleging that money was ill-gotten," Howard said.
A 2011 state investigation found cheating by nearly 180 educators in 44 Atlanta schools. Educators gave answers to students or changed answers on tests after they were turned in, investigators said. Teachers who tried to report it faced retaliation, creating a culture of "fear and intimidation," the investigation found.
State schools Superintendent John Barge said last year he believed the state's new accountability system would remove the pressure to cheat on standardized tests because it won't be the sole way the state determines student growth. The pressure was part of what some educators in the system blamed for their cheating.
A former top official in the New York City school system who later headed the Newark, N.J. system for three years, Hall served as Atlanta's superintendent for more than a decade, which is rare for an urban schools chief. She was named Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators in 2009 and credited with raising student test scores and graduation rates, particularly among the district's poor and minority students. But the award quickly lost its luster as her district became mired in the scandal.
In a video message to schools staff before she retired in the summer of 2011, Hall warned that the state investigation launched by former Gov. Sonny Perdue would likely reveal "alarming" behavior.
"It's become increasingly clear that a segment of our staff chose to violate the trust that was placed in them," Hall said. "There is simply no excuse for unethical behavior and no room in this district for unethical conduct. I am confident that aggressive, swift action will be taken against anyone who believed so little in our students and in our system of support that they turned to dishonesty as the only option."
The cheating came to light after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some scores were statistically improbable.
Most of the 178 educators named in the special investigators' report in 2011 resigned, retired, did not have their contracts renewed or appealed their dismissals and lost. Twenty-one educators have been reinstated and three await hearings to appeal their dismissals, said Atlanta Public Schools spokesman Stephen Alford.
APS Superintendent Erroll Davis said the district, which has about 50,000 students, is now focused on nurturing an ethical environment, providing quality education and supporting the employees who were not implicated.
"I know that our children will succeed when the adults around them work hard, work together, and do so with integrity," he said in a statement.
The Georgia Professional Standards Commission is responsible for licensing teachers and has been going through the complaints against teachers, said commission executive secretary Kelly Henson. Of the 159 cases the commission has reviewed, 44 resulted in license revocations, 100 got two-year suspensions and nine were suspended for less than two years, Henson said. No action was taken against six of the educators.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed on Friday a rule to clean up gasoline. The new lower sulfur gas is already what California uses to reduce air pollution, and the EPA wants it to be used nationwide. The agency estimates that it would save lives while adding a penny a gallon to the cost of gas. The oil industry fears it will cost more.
We've been tracking the sun-powered plane known as Solar Impulse for years as it roved hither and yon. Today, Solar Impulse's pilots, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, came to NASA's Ames research center to announce their plan to fly across America. The cross-country tour will begin in the Bay Area and end in New York, with stops in Phoenix, Dallas and Washington DC in between. Solar Impulse will also land in either Atlanta, Nashville or St. Louis, with the plane and its pilots set to stay in each locale for about a week to ten days to talk about the project before moving on. For the next month, Piccard and Borschberg will perform test flights around the Bay Area in preparation, and the plan is for the journey to start on May 1st, with an estimated arrival in Gotham sometime in early July.
The point of this new flight is to inspire and educate the public in general of the benefits of renewable energy and efficiency, and to encourage school children and university students in particular to "think off the grid" and innovate and invent on their own. To that end, the pilots will be broadcasting live transmissions and allowing the public to speak with them as they fly, in addition to providing access to flight planning information on the Solar Impulse website. Read on to learn a bit more about the Solar Impulse project and it's future plans.
Our pre-caffeine roundup is a collection of the hottest, strangest, and most amusing stories of the morning.
Surprise! Facebook sent out an invitation to the media late Thursday afternoon for an April 4 where the company would show off their "new home on Android."
A San Francisco photographer, who discovered his stolen camera on Craigslist, turned Web sleuth, getting back his camera and assisting in the thief's arrest.
Finally! Riders of public transportation in New York and Salt Lake City are the first to get real-time departure info in Google Maps. Washington, D.C. residents will also get a bit of new live transit info.
Take a look at what may be the new face of the next generation of video games -- the face is fake, but the tech is real!
Meanwhile, New York University is aiming to cement its position as a leader in the young field of video game studies by opening a 40,000-square-foot institute called the Media and Games Network in downtown Brooklyn next fall.
Here's what you need to know about the government's fight to unlock your cellphone.
And here's how Spamhaus DDoS attack could have been prevented.
Salon says "Google lost its cool" ... and here's how that happened.
And the Atlantic explains how to freak out, appropriately, about the Internet War Apocalypse
In closing: The cutest Easter photos that every happened! EVER!
Compiled by Helen A.S. Popkin, who invites you to join her on Twitter and/or Facebook.
Nikki and Jill Goldstein in Expedia's gay marriage-themed ad.
According to one of the real-life stars of Expedia's gay marriage-themed ad, the spot played an?instrumental role in the adoption of her son.?
Expedia and 180LA released a video last October in which businessman Artie Goldstein hesitantly travels across the country for his daughter Jill's wedding to another woman, which occurred in 2010.
"That startled me. I told her, this is not the dream I had for my daughter," he says. But along the way his perspective completely shifts and he proudly stands at his daughter's side during the wedding.
Nikki Weiss-Goldstein, Artie's new daughter-in-law, recently posted to her Facebook that commercial helped sway a social worker to determining she was fit to adopt her son that her wife gave birth to.
After a frosty meeting with the social worker, that included fingerprinting and a barrage of questions, Weiss-Goldstein told Ad Age,??"then she asked us how our family felt about our relationship. I think Expedia had just come out a week before. We looked at each other, played it for her and she was just in tears. I don't think there were any more questions after that."
She posted on her Facebook, "If we changed that social worker's views that day, we made a small difference in this world."
Both spouses work in advertising, Jill has been copywriter at the likes of of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Y&R, and Nikki runs?Nikki Weiss & Co. She also appeared on the first season of the reality show "The Real L Word."
Expedia approached the couple after they decided not to participate in season two of the show.
Watch the ad below and check out her Facebook post on Ad Age:
SEOUL (Reuters) - The United States flew two Stealth bomber practice runs over South Korea on Thursday, in a second show of force to North Korea after a B52 bomber made a similar run earlier this week amid rising tensions on the Korean peninsula.
The flights came after North Korea said it would attack American bases in the Pacific following a U.S.-led drive to impose sanctions on North Korea for its third nuclear weapons test.
The North has also threatened U.S. "puppet" South Korea with war and the U.S. mainland with nuclear attack.
"This mission by two B-2 Spirit bombers assigned to 509th Bomb Wing...demonstrates the United States' ability to conduct long-range, precision strikes quickly and at will," the United States Forces in Korea said in a statement.
North Korea has put its armed forces on readiness to fight what it says are "hostile" war drills by the United States and South Korea. The U.S. says the annual drills are defensive.
Pyongyang has also cancelled an armistice agreement with the United States that ended the 1950-53 Korean War and cut all communications hotlines with U.S. forces, the United Nations and South Korea.
The U.S. military said that its bombers had flown more than 6,500 miles to stage a trial bombing raid from their bases in Missouri as part of Foal Eagle war drills being held with South Korea.
The U.S. military announced on March 15 it was bolstering missile defenses in response to threats from the North, including a threat to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States.
Despite the shrill words, few believe North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, will risk starting a full-out war.
North and South Korea are still technically at war anyway after their 1950-53 civil conflict ended with the armistice, not a treaty.
North Korea conducted a third nuclear weapons test in February in breach of U.N. sanctions and despite warnings from China, its one major diplomatic ally.
Despite the tide of hostile rhetoric from Pyongyang, it has kept a joint economic zone with the South open as it generates $2 billion a year in trade from the venture, money the impoverished state can ill-afford to lose.
North Korea will celebrate the anniversary of the birth of its founding father, Kim Il-sung, on April 15. The current ruler is Kim Jong-un, his 30-year old grandson.
While the North has an armory of Soviet-era Scud missiles that can hit South Korea, its longer-range missiles remain untested.
Independent assessments of its missile strike force suggest that it may have the theoretical capacity to hit U.S. bases in Japan and Guam, but the North has not tested these missiles.
North Korea shelled a South Korean island in 2010 and is charged with the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel in the same year. Pyongyang denies it sank the ship.
(Reporting by David Chance; Editing by Nick Macfie)
It's not quite a minivan fit for a technophile, despite the standard lineup of 2014 in-vehicle gadgets, such as HondaLink with a smartphone interface, HD Radio and an updated center stack. But Honda's 2014 Odyssey does ship with one very practical addition: a built-in HondaVAC, designed with assistance from the good folks at Shop-Vac. The integrated vacuum cleaner lets you tidy up around the van and outside as well, and with integrated power, it doesn't need to be plugged in for use. It can suck indefinitely when the engine's running, or for up to eight minutes with the car turned off. It's integrated within the rear cargo area, and includes a replaceable filter and a canister bag, for easy rubbish disposal. The Odyssey just made its debut at the New York Auto Show, and pricing and availability have yet to be announced. You can check it out for yourself this week in NYC, however, or take a closer look in the promo video embedded just past the break.
Maybe you don't know the first thing about wine except that you like it. Hell, maybe you make your oenological choices based on how cool the label is. Even if the wine is crap, you can still nail the presentation with STACT, a slick modular wine rack. More »
27 March 2013Last updated at 09:03 ETBy Dave LeeTechnology reporter, BBC News
The internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack of its kind in history.
A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm has sparked retaliation attacks affecting the wider internet.
It is having an impact on popular services like Netflix - and experts worry it could escalate to affect banking and email systems.
Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.
Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit organisation which aims to help email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content.
To do this, the group maintains a number of blocklists - a database of servers known to be being used for malicious purposes.
Recently, Spamhaus blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker, a Dutch web host which states it will host anything with the exception of child pornography or terrorism-related material.
Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who claims to be a spokesman for Cyberbunker, said, in a message, that Spamhaus was abusing its position, and should not be allowed to decide "what goes and does not go on the internet".
Spamhaus has alleged that Cyberbunker, in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe and Russia, is behind the attack.
Cyberbunker has not responded to the BBC's request for comment.
'Immense job'
Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC the scale of the attack was unprecedented.
"We've been under this cyber-attack for well over a week.
Continue reading the main story
'Decapitating the internet'
Writing exactly one year ago for the BBC, Prof Alan Woodward predicted the inherent weaknesses in the web's domain name system.
He wrote: "It is essentially the phone book for the internet. If you could prevent access to the phone book then you would effectively render the web useless."
Read Prof Woodward's full article
"But we're up - they haven't been able to knock us down. Our engineers are doing an immense job in keeping it up - this sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else."
Mr Linford told the BBC that the attack was being investigated by five different national cyber-police-forces around the world.
He claimed he was unable to disclose more details because the forces were concerned that they too may suffer attacks on their own infrastructure.
The attackers have used a tactic known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which floods the intended target with large amounts of traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable.
In this case, Spamhaus's Domain Name System (DNS) servers were targeted - the infrastructure that joins domain names, such as bbc.co.uk, the website's numerical internet protocol address.
Mr Linford said the attack's power would be strong enough to take down government internet infrastructure.
"If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly," he said. "They would be completely off the internet."
He added: "These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second).
"Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 gb/s."
Clogged-up motorway
The knock-on effect is hurting internet services globally, said Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.
"If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog up the on and off ramps," he told the BBC.
"With this attack, there's so much traffic it's clogging up the motorway itself."
Arbor Networks, a firm which specialises in protecting against DDoS attacks, also said it was the biggest such attack they had seen.
"The largest DDoS attack that we have witness prior to this was in 2010, which was 100 gb/s. Obviously the jump from 100 to 300 is pretty massive," said Dan Holden, the company's director of security research.
"There's certainly possibility for some collateral damage to other services along the way, depending on what that infrastructure looks like."
Spamhaus said it was able to cope as it has highly distributed infrastructure in a number of countries.
The group is supported by many of the world's largest internet companies who rely on it to filter unwanted material.
Mr Linford told the BBC that several companies, such as Google, had made their resources available to help "absorb all of this traffic".
The attacks typically happened in intermittent bursts of high activity.
"They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down," Mr Linford said.
"We can't be brought down.
"Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We've built the biggest DNS server around."
PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) ? A judge in South Africa says Oscar Pistorius, who is charged with murdering his girlfriend, can leave South Africa to compete in international competition, with conditions.
Judge Bert Bam says the Olympic and Paralympic athlete must provide authorities with his travel plans at least a week before he leaves the country. He must also return his passport to the court within 24 hours of returning to South Africa
Pistorius' lawyers said in the North Gauteng High Court on Thursday that he had no immediate plans to compete, but might eventually need to run at track meets again to earn money.
Cancer biologists find DNA-damaging toxins in common plant-based foodsPublic release date: 27-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Vanessa Wasta wasta@jhmi.edu 410-614-2916 Johns Hopkins Medicine
Liquid smoke, black and green teas and coffee produced levels of cell DNA damage comparable to chemo drugs
In a laboratory study pairing food chemistry and cancer biology, scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center tested the potentially harmful effect of foods and flavorings on the DNA of cells. They found that liquid smoke flavoring, black and green teas and coffee activated the highest levels of a well-known, cancer-linked gene called p53.
The p53 gene becomes activated when DNA is damaged. Its gene product makes repair proteins that mend DNA. The higher the level of DNA damage, the more p53 becomes activated.
"We don't know much about the foods we eat and how they affect cells in our bodies," says Scott Kern, M.D., the Kovler Professor of Oncology and Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "But it's clear that plants contain many compounds that are meant to deter humans and animals from eating them, like cellulose in stems and bitter-tasting tannins in leaves and beans we use to make teas and coffees, and their impact needs to be assessed."
Kern cautioned that his studies do not suggest people should stop using tea, coffee or flavorings, but do suggest the need for further research.
The Johns Hopkins study began a year ago when graduate student Samuel Gilbert, working in Kern's laboratory, noted that a test Kern had developed to detect p53 activity had never been used to identify DNA-damaging substances in food.
For the study, published online February 8 in Food and Chemical Toxicology, Kern and his team sought advice from scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture about food products and flavorings. "To do this study well, we had to think like food chemists to extract chemicals from food and dilute food products to levels that occur in a normal diet," he says.
Using Kern's test for p53 activity, which makes a fluorescent compound that "glows" when p53 is activated, the scientists mixed dilutions of the food products and flavorings with human cells and grew them in laboratory dishes for 18 hours.
Measuring and comparing p53 activity with baseline levels, the scientists found that liquid smoke flavoring, black and green teas and coffee showed up to nearly 30-fold increases in p53 activity, which was on par with their tests of p53 activity caused by a chemotherapy drug called etoposide.
Previous studies have shown that liquid smoke flavoring damages DNA in animal models, so Kern's team analyzed p53 activity triggered by the chemicals found in liquid smoke. Postdoctoral fellow Zulfiquer Hossain tracked down the chemicals responsible for the p53 activity. The strongest p53 activity was found in two chemicals: pyrogallol and gallic acid. Pyrogallol, commonly found in smoked foods, is also found in cigarette smoke, hair dye, tea, coffee, bread crust, roasted malt and cocoa powder, according to Kern. Gallic acid, a variant of pyrogallol, is found in teas and coffees.
Kern says that more studies are needed to examine the type of DNA damage caused by pyrogallol and gallic acid, but there could be ways to remove the two chemicals from foods and flavorings.
"We found that Scotch whiskey, which has a smoky flavor and could be a substitute for liquid smoke, had minimal effect on p53 activity in our tests," says Kern.
Liquid smoke, produced from the distilled condensation of natural smoke, is often used to add smoky flavor to sausages, other meats and vegan meat substitutes. It gained popularity when sausage manufacturers switched from natural casings to smoke-blocking artificial casings.
Other flavorings like fish and oyster sauces, tabasco and soy sauces, and black bean sauces showed minimal p53 effects in Kern's tests, as did soybean paste, kim chee, wasabi powder, hickory smoke powders and smoked paprika.
###
Funding for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute (CA62924) and the Everett and Marjorie Kovler Professorship in Pancreas Cancer Research.
In addition to Kern, Gilbert and Hossain, other scientists involved in the research include Kalpesh Patel, Soma Ghosh, and Anil Bhunia from Johns Hopkins.
On the Web:
hopkinscancer.org
Media Contacts: Vanessa Wasta, 410-614-2916
wasta@jhmi.edu
Amy Mone, 410-614-2915
amone@jhmi.edu
March 27, 2013
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Cancer biologists find DNA-damaging toxins in common plant-based foodsPublic release date: 27-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Vanessa Wasta wasta@jhmi.edu 410-614-2916 Johns Hopkins Medicine
Liquid smoke, black and green teas and coffee produced levels of cell DNA damage comparable to chemo drugs
In a laboratory study pairing food chemistry and cancer biology, scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center tested the potentially harmful effect of foods and flavorings on the DNA of cells. They found that liquid smoke flavoring, black and green teas and coffee activated the highest levels of a well-known, cancer-linked gene called p53.
The p53 gene becomes activated when DNA is damaged. Its gene product makes repair proteins that mend DNA. The higher the level of DNA damage, the more p53 becomes activated.
"We don't know much about the foods we eat and how they affect cells in our bodies," says Scott Kern, M.D., the Kovler Professor of Oncology and Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "But it's clear that plants contain many compounds that are meant to deter humans and animals from eating them, like cellulose in stems and bitter-tasting tannins in leaves and beans we use to make teas and coffees, and their impact needs to be assessed."
Kern cautioned that his studies do not suggest people should stop using tea, coffee or flavorings, but do suggest the need for further research.
The Johns Hopkins study began a year ago when graduate student Samuel Gilbert, working in Kern's laboratory, noted that a test Kern had developed to detect p53 activity had never been used to identify DNA-damaging substances in food.
For the study, published online February 8 in Food and Chemical Toxicology, Kern and his team sought advice from scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture about food products and flavorings. "To do this study well, we had to think like food chemists to extract chemicals from food and dilute food products to levels that occur in a normal diet," he says.
Using Kern's test for p53 activity, which makes a fluorescent compound that "glows" when p53 is activated, the scientists mixed dilutions of the food products and flavorings with human cells and grew them in laboratory dishes for 18 hours.
Measuring and comparing p53 activity with baseline levels, the scientists found that liquid smoke flavoring, black and green teas and coffee showed up to nearly 30-fold increases in p53 activity, which was on par with their tests of p53 activity caused by a chemotherapy drug called etoposide.
Previous studies have shown that liquid smoke flavoring damages DNA in animal models, so Kern's team analyzed p53 activity triggered by the chemicals found in liquid smoke. Postdoctoral fellow Zulfiquer Hossain tracked down the chemicals responsible for the p53 activity. The strongest p53 activity was found in two chemicals: pyrogallol and gallic acid. Pyrogallol, commonly found in smoked foods, is also found in cigarette smoke, hair dye, tea, coffee, bread crust, roasted malt and cocoa powder, according to Kern. Gallic acid, a variant of pyrogallol, is found in teas and coffees.
Kern says that more studies are needed to examine the type of DNA damage caused by pyrogallol and gallic acid, but there could be ways to remove the two chemicals from foods and flavorings.
"We found that Scotch whiskey, which has a smoky flavor and could be a substitute for liquid smoke, had minimal effect on p53 activity in our tests," says Kern.
Liquid smoke, produced from the distilled condensation of natural smoke, is often used to add smoky flavor to sausages, other meats and vegan meat substitutes. It gained popularity when sausage manufacturers switched from natural casings to smoke-blocking artificial casings.
Other flavorings like fish and oyster sauces, tabasco and soy sauces, and black bean sauces showed minimal p53 effects in Kern's tests, as did soybean paste, kim chee, wasabi powder, hickory smoke powders and smoked paprika.
###
Funding for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute (CA62924) and the Everett and Marjorie Kovler Professorship in Pancreas Cancer Research.
In addition to Kern, Gilbert and Hossain, other scientists involved in the research include Kalpesh Patel, Soma Ghosh, and Anil Bhunia from Johns Hopkins.
On the Web:
hopkinscancer.org
Media Contacts: Vanessa Wasta, 410-614-2916
wasta@jhmi.edu
Amy Mone, 410-614-2915
amone@jhmi.edu
March 27, 2013
[ | 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.
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Public release date: 27-Mar-2013
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