Kyiesha blog

Florida Atlantic defeats Fla. International 73-72

BOCA RATON, Fla. – Brett Royster scored 18 points and hit a layup with 4 seconds left to lift Florida Atlantic to a 73-72 victory over Florida International on Saturday night.

Royster scored on an assist from Alex Tucker as the Owls (18-7, 10-1 Sun Belt Conference) won for the 10th time in 11 games. Royster's basket was the only time Florida Atlantic led in the game and capped a comeback from a seven-point deficit with 1:10 remaining.

Shavar Richardson hit two 3-pointers to cut the margin to 72-69 with 52 seconds left and Raymond Taylor made two free throws to chop the lead to 72-71 with 14 seconds to play.

FIU's Phil Gary missed two free-throw attempts, setting up Royster's heroics.

Greg Gantt scored 19 points, Richardson had 14 and Taylor added 10 for the Owls.

Phil Taylor scored 16, Marvin Roberts had 13 and Jeremy Allen and DeJuan Wright added 10 each for FIU (9-14, 4-7).

NY Times editor reveals difficult dealings with Assange

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, told The Cutline yesterday that the paper isfor potential leakers.

That's probably a good idea, since it's unlikely WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange will fork over any secret documents following . (Keller's lengthy piece is an excerpt from a forthcoming Times e-book, "Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy," that drops on Jan. 31)

Some tensions between the Times and WikiLeaks have already spilled out in public. In October, Assange for its coverage of him and alleged leaker Private Bradley Manning. The following month, The Timesof the diplomatic cables it based its reporting on. Indeed, the Guardian

Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison alreadyon The Guardian's stormy relationship with WikiLeaks over the past year. Now Keller offers the Times's account of what it's like to collaborate--or try to--with Julian Assange. (Perhaps Assange will have the last word. Shortly after the Times piece went online, CBS announced that he'll appear Sunday on "60 Minutes.")

Keller begins with a June phone call. The Guardian had made an agreement with Assange, and the paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, wanted to get the Times in on the trove of classified documents. Keller notes that the Times didn't have a secure line, as Rusbridger requests, but the two editors got the ball rolling.

"By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it had profoundly changed forever," Keller wrote.

News organizations such as the Times and Guardian along with Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, El Pais and others would help amplify the many about theand Afghanistan, together with other bombshell revelations about the conduct of high-level international diplomacy that could be found in the cache of secret documents.

Here are a few nuggets from Keller's first-person piece on dealing with Assange and some of the issues that came up while reporting out the three megaleaks last year.

On Assange: Keller described Assange as "a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian)" and later, "a man who clearly had his own agenda." The Times editor also describes what reporters dealing with Assange in London thought of him: "smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous."

Inside the Times before : He writes: "An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always 'the source.' The latest data drop was 'the package.' When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project…."

Inside the government before release: Keller describes talking to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at a party: "A voracious consumer of inside information, Holbrooke had a decent idea of what was coming, and he pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry, thus demonstrating both the frantic anxiety in the administration and, not incidentally, the fact that he was very much in the loop."

Relationship with Assange falls apart after release: "I talked to Assange by phone a few times and heard out his complaints. He was angry that we declined to linkto the , a decision we made because we feared rightly, as it turned out that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. 'Where's the respect?' he demanded. 'Where's the respect?' " Later, Assange voiced his concerns with profiles of Manning and himself.

One meeting with government officials: Keller wrote that before publication of articles related to the diplomatic cables, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet took a meeting with "representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Pentagon" all at one conference table.

Assange demands apology: The Guardian agreed not to share the diplomatic cables with the Times, but after obtaining them from a source outside WikiLeaks, the British paper's editors felt that they no longer had to comply with the earlier agreement and passed them along. On Nov. 1, Assange and his lawyers had a tense meeting over this in Rusbridger's office. Keller writes: "Over the course of an eight-hour meeting, Assange intermittently raged against The Timesespecially over our front-page profilewhile The Guardian journalists tried to calm him. In midstorm, Rusbridger called me to report on Assange's grievances and relay his demand for a front-page apology in The Times. Rusbridger knew that this was a nonstarter, but he was buying time for the tantrum to subside."

On prosecuting WikiLeaks: Keller writes that it's "chilling to contemplate thefor making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated."

(Cover courtesy of the New York Times)

New hope for hepatitis C, an often hidden disease

WASHINGTON – There's new hope for an overlooked epidemic: Two powerful drugs are nearing the market that promise to help cure many more people of liver-attacking hepatitis C — even though most who have the simmering infection don't know it yet.

Surprisingly, two-thirds of hepatitis C sufferers are thought to be baby boomers who've harbored since their younger, perhaps wilder, years a virus that can take two or three decades to do its damage.

What could be a treatment revolution is spurring the government to consider if it's time to start screening aging baby boomers for hepatitis C, just like they get various cancer checks.

"We're entering a whole new era of therapy," says Dr. John Ward, hepatitis chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We really want to begin that clarion call for action for this population who's at risk."

Today's two-drug treatment for hepatitis C cures only about 40 percent of people with the most common variety of the virus, and causes some grueling side effects. Now major studies show that adding a new drug _either Vertex Pharmaceuticals' telaprevir or Merck & Co.'s boceprevir — can boost those cure rates as high as 75 percent. And they allow some people to cut treatment time in half, to six months, thus lessening how long they must deal with those side effects.

If the Food and Drug Administration approves the drugs — a decision widely expected this summer — they would be the first that work by directly targeting the hepatitis C virus. Specialists draw comparisons to the early 1990s when potent combination therapies emerged to treat AIDS. Many recently diagnosed patients are postponing therapy to await these new drug cocktails in hopes of a better chance at a faster cure, says Dr. Paul Pockros, hepatology chief at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., who helped test telaprevir.

However, the bigger impact could come if more people get tested for hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus. It's often stigmatized as a risk only to people who inject illegal drugs. But the virus could have begun festering from a blood transfusion before 1992, when testing of the blood supply began.

Lapses in infection control in health facilities still occasionally expose people today. So could even a one-time experiment with drugs way back in college, something doctors are reluctant to ask a now middle-aged, button-downed patient to reveal, says Ward.

"It cuts across every segment of society," adds Dr. Arun Sanyal of Virginia Commonwealth University, past president of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. "I can tell you our hepatitis C treatment clinic is a great social equalizer."

About 3.2 million Americans, and 170 million people worldwide, have chronic hepatitis C. In the U.S., new infections have dropped dramatically — although the disease's toll is rising as people infected decades earlier reach ages where their livers start showing damage. Hepatitis C already is a leading cause of liver transplants, and it kills about 12,000 U.S. patients a year, a number expected to triple within 20 years.

Most people find out they're infected like Brian Graham of Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., during a routine check-up that spotted elevated liver enzymes. He'd never heard of hepatitis C and had no obvious risk factors. But tests showed the virus had begun to scar his liver. So over the last decade he tried three rounds of traditional treatments, with increasingly tough side effects, to no avail.

"I didn't want to die of liver disease or cancer or suffer the prospect of having to tee up for a liver transplant. Scary stuff," says Graham, now 56.

Enter the new drugs. They work by blocking an enzyme named protease that's key for the virus to reproduce. But they must be taken together with standard medications — ribavirin pills plus injections of interferon-alpha — that are thought to boost the immune system.

According to studies presented at a recent medical meeting, 67 percent to 75 percent of patients given treatment including either boceprevir or telaprevir, respectively, had what doctors call a cure. That's defined as no sign of the hepatitis C virus six months after their last dose. Importantly, only about a quarter of black patients are helped by standard therapy but adding one of the new drugs more than doubled their cure rates.

People getting their first-ever treatment did best, but the studies also found improvements in hard-to-treat patients like Graham.

"The fourth time did the trick," says Graham, who volunteered for an early telaprevir study and says he's been hepatitis-free for three years.

The new drugs do add side effects to the flulike symptoms and other complaints of existing treatment. Telaprevir's main risk is a rash that is sometimes severe, and boceprevir's is anemia.

"The future looks very bright beyond telaprevir and boceprevir," notes Dr. Fred Poordad of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who has studied both drugs and consults for several companies. He points to additional drugs in earlier-stage testing that promise to target more types of hepatitis C and perhaps eventually allow for pill-only, interferon-free treatment.

Manufacturers haven't said how much the new drugs will add to the price of treatment that already can cost $30,000, albeit far cheaper than a liver transplant.

A stickier issue: Not everyone suffers serious liver damage and it's hard to predict who will, raising questions about exactly who needs treatment even as drug companies help push for more screening."

That's a concern, acknowledges Jeff Levi of the nonprofit Trust for America's Health, also a screening proponent. But when to treat is a doctor-patient decision, and "anyone with chronic infection you do want to be monitoring so you can intervene at the right moment," he adds.

Plus, people with hepatitis C should avoid alcohol and consider other liver-protection steps — and know how to avoid infecting others, he stresses.

Stay tuned: The CDC has begun a study at four hospitals — in New York, Detroit, Houston and Birmingham, Ala. — to see if a one-time hepatitis C test for baby boomers makes sense. Among the boomers, black men in their 50s are at particular risk. CDC plans new guidelines next year.

Meanwhile, "start that conversation" at a routine doctor's visit by asking about hepatitis C risks and testing, Ward advises boomers.

___

EDITOR's NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

New York City mayor opens the door to 401(k) for city workers

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York City workers who are hired in the future might be offered 401(k) thrift plans instead of traditional pension plans that guarantee a certain benefit upon retirement, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday.

The necessity of reducing the soaring pension costs for the city's workers was a centerpiece of Bloomberg's State of the City address on Wednesday, and he previously has focused on persuading the state to let the city create a less generous fifth tier of pension benefits for future hires.

"You know, you can negotiate with everybody. Maybe it comes out that way," Bloomberg said on his weekly WOR radio show, when asked about offering 401(k) or thrift plans instead of traditional pensions.

With 401(k) plans, workers only collect their own contributions and those made by their employers -- plus or minus any investment profits or losses. These kinds of newer retirement plans disappointed some workers whose stock investments slumped during the credit crunch.

In 2011, New York City's pension costs will rise to $7 billion from $1.5 billion in 2001, Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

"That means that this year, the average New York City tax filer will be paying $2,400 more to cover pension costs than they did back then," he said. Had subway fares risen at the same clip, they would have climbed to $7.05 this year and $8.39 next year -- a one-trip ride now costs $2.25.

New York City would need the state's permission to negotiate any pension benefits -- a fifth less costly tier or a thrift plan -- with city workers, and Bloomberg has put this request high on his lobbying agenda.

Many states and cities around the nation are struggling to fully fund their pension funds. Despite big shortfalls, they are almost always bound -- by contracts, statutes or their own constitutions -- to honor their promises to retirees and current workers.

Bloomberg stressed he only wished to slice the costs of retirement plans for people who have yet to be hired.

"My loyalties are to the people who are already working for the city, and I will do everything I can to protect their benefits and their jobs," Bloomberg said on his radio show.

"I have no obligation to those that we have not yet hired, so hiring the next class of people at different compensation levels with different benefits, you know, you don't have to take the job. You don't have to apply for it," he added.

(Reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing byenneth Barry)

Important News Regarding Keurig K-Cup Portion Packs in 2011 from CoffeeGIANT.com

Continuing rising costs of coffee, compounded with manufacturing delays

Carrollton, TX (Vocus/PRWEB) January 21, 2011

Due to a 2009-2010 coffee crop shortage, costs of green coffee (bean) prices have soared dramatically to their highest levels in over 13 years. Across the board, from bagged coffees to single-serve products, our suppliers have passed on these price increases, ranging from 10-15 percent, and sometimes more.

In October 2010,president of Specialty Coffee business unit Scott McCreary stated, "Like others in the coffee industry, we have been closely monitoring rising green coffee costs and increases and other input costs like cocoa and packaging for several months... While we have the flexibility to absorb from short-term cost increases, the sustained nature of the increases we've experienced over the past three months led us to conclude it is necessary to adjust our pricing."

We have been alerted by ourvendors that prices for Keurig K-Cups will be increased again, beginning February 1, 2011. CoffeeGIANT is proud of its reputation as a competitively priced source for all of our customers' coffee needs, achieved without compromising quality or service levels.We will continuously strive to secure lower cost, high quality coffee products going forward.

A select group of seasonal K-Cup blends have been discontinued by Green Mountain Coffee, including the popular Holiday Blend, Wicked Winter Blend, Spring Revival, Summer Safari and Autumn Harvest Blend.According to a blog post from Green Mountain Coffee (released January 21, 2011), these items were discontinued in their K-Cup form because their flavored seasonal counterparts outsold the blends by 4 to 1.

These issues with cost stabilization and discontinued blends have been compounded by recent problems roasters face with rebounding after an extremely successful holiday season.Many Keurig K-Cup manufacturers greatly underestimated product demand, and are struggling to regain proper production levels.Because of this, CoffeeGIANT™ and other single-serve suppliers are experiencing product shipping delays and constant back-orders from manufacturers on most popular blends.

Though we have hope that Keurig K-Cup roasters and manufacturers will bounce back soon, we understand how frustrating this time can be to the end user, our customers.The CoffeeGIANT™ staff is happy to recommend comparable blends, or share our estimated date for deliveries of preferred selections.Contact our staff toll-free at (800) 480-8071 during regular business hours: 7am-5pm CST.

About CoffeeGIANT™    CoffeeGIANT.com is a leading source for single-serve products and machines, since 2005.An authorized Keurig distributor, specializing in single-serve coffee and tea needs for Keurig, Flavia and other specialty brewers, gadgets, tips and accessories.CoffeeGIANT™ offers the , where every sixth box of Keurig K-Cups is free, as well as completely free FedEx Ground shipping on all orders delivered within the continental United States.

Additional information about CoffeeGIANT™, and it's products and services is available at .Follow CoffeeGIANT™ on Twitter at @CoffeeGIANT / Like us on Facebook at .

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Beth SeeberCoffeeGIANT.com972-323-1824Email Information