Seau's family sues NFL over brain injuries

Add Junior Seau's family to the thousands of people who are suing the NFL over the long-term damage caused by concussions.

Seau's ex-wife and four children sued the league Wednesday, saying the former linebacker's suicide was the result of brain disease caused by violent hits he sustained while playing football.

The wrongful death lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court in San Diego, blames the NFL for its "acts or omissions" that hid the dangers of repetitive blows to the head. It says Seau developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) from those hits, and accuses the NFL of deliberately ignoring and concealing evidence of the risks associated with traumatic brain injuries.

Seau died at age 43 of a self-inflicted gunshot in May. He was diagnosed with CTE, based on posthumous tests, earlier this month.

An Associated Press review in November found that more than 3,800 players have sued the NFL over head injuries in at least 175 cases as the concussion issue has gained attention in recent years. The total number of plaintiffs is 6,000 when spouses, relatives and other representatives are included.

Scores of the concussion lawsuits have been brought together before U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia.

"Our attorneys will review it and respond to the claims appropriately through the court," the NFL said in a statement Wednesday.

Helmet manufacturer Riddell Inc., also is a defendant, with the Seau family saying Riddell was "negligent in their design, testing, assembly, manufacture, marketing, and engineering of the helmets" used by NFL players. The suit says the helmets were unreasonably dangerous and unsafe.

Riddell issued a statement saying it is, "confident in the integrity of our products and our ability to successfully defend our products against challenges."

Seau was one of the best linebackers during his 20 seasons in the NFL, retiring in 2009.

"We were saddened to learn that Junior, a loving father and teammate, suffered from CTE," the family said in a statement released to the AP. "While Junior always expected to have aches and pains from his playing days, none of us ever fathomed that he would suffer a debilitating brain disease that would cause him to leave us too soon.

"We know this lawsuit will not bring back Junior. But it will send a message that the NFL needs to care for its former players, acknowledge its decades of deception on the issue of head injuries and player safety, and make the game safer for future generations."

Plaintiffs are listed as Gina Seau, Junior's ex-wife; Junior's children Tyler, Sydney, Jake and Hunter, and Bette Hoffman, trustee of Seau's estate.

The lawsuit accuses the league of glorifying the violence in pro football, and creating the impression that delivering big hits "is a badge of courage which does not seriously threaten one's health."

It singles out NFL Films and some of its videos for promoting the brutality of the game.

"In 1993's 'NFL Rocks,' Junior Seau offered his opinion on the measure of a punishing hit: 'If I can feel some dizziness, I know that guy is feeling double (that)," the suit says.

The NFL consistently has denied allegations similar to those in the lawsuit.

"The NFL, both directly and in partnership with the NIH, Centers for Disease Control and other leading organizations, is committed to supporting a wide range of independent medical and scientific research that will both address CTE and promote the long-term health and safety of athletes at all levels," the league told the AP after it was revealed Seau had CTE.

The lawsuit claims money was behind the NFL's actions.

"The NFL knew or suspected that any rule changes that sought to recognize that link (to brain disease) and the health risk to NFL players would impose an economic cost that would significantly and adversely change the profit margins enjoyed by the NFL and its teams," the Seaus said in the suit.

The National Institutes of Health, based in Bethesda, Md., studied three unidentified brains, one of which was Seau's, and said the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries."

"It was important to us to get to the bottom of this, the truth," Gina Seau told the AP then. "And now that it has been conclusively determined from every expert that he had obviously had CTE, we just hope it is taken more seriously. You can't deny it exists, and it is hard to deny there is a link between head trauma and CTE. There's such strong evidence correlating head trauma and collisions and CTE."

In the final years of his life, Seau went through wild behavior swings, according to Gina and to 23-year-old son, Tyler. There also were signs of irrationality, forgetfulness, insomnia and depression.

"He emotionally detached himself and would kind of 'go away' for a little bit," Tyler Seau said. "And then the depression and things like that. It started to progressively get worse."

Read More..

Well: Long Term Effects on Life Expectancy From Smoking

It is often said that smoking takes years off your life, and now a new study shows just how many: Longtime smokers can expect to lose about 10 years of life expectancy.

But amid those grim findings was some good news for former smokers. Those who quit before they turn 35 can gain most if not all of that decade back, and even those who wait until middle age to kick the habit can add about five years back to their life expectancies.

“There’s the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you,” said Dr. Tim McAfee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off — and that’s just on average.”

The findings were part of research, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, that looked at government data on more than 200,000 Americans who were followed starting in 1997. Similar studies that were done in the 1980s and the decades prior had allowed scientists to predict the impact of smoking on mortality. But since then many population trends have changed, and it was unclear whether smokers today fared differently from smokers decades ago.

Since the 1960s, the prevalence of smoking over all has declined, falling from about 40 percent to 20 percent. Today more than half of people that ever smoked have quit, allowing researchers to compare the effects of stopping at various ages.

Modern cigarettes contain less tar and medical advances have cut the rates of death from vascular disease drastically. But have smokers benefited from these advances?

Women in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s had lower rates of mortality from smoking than men. But it was largely unknown whether this was a biological difference or merely a matter of different habits: earlier generations of women smoked fewer cigarettes and tended to take up smoking at a later age than men.

Now that smoking habits among women today are similar to those of men, would mortality rates be the same as well?

“There was a big gap in our knowledge,” said Dr. McAfee, an author of the study and the director of the C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Public Health.

The new research showed that in fact women are no more protected from the consequences of smoking than men. The female smokers in the study represented the first generation of American women that generally began smoking early in life and continued the habit for decades, and the impact on life span was clear. The risk of death from smoking for these women was 50 percent higher than the risk reported for women in similar studies carried out in the 1980s.

“This sort of puts the nail in the coffin around the idea that women might somehow be different or that they suffer fewer effects of smoking,” Dr. McAfee said.

It also showed that differences between smokers and the population in general are becoming more and more stark. Over the last 20 years, advances in medicine and public health have improved life expectancy for the general public, but smokers have not benefited in the same way.

“If anything, this is accentuating the difference between being a smoker and a nonsmoker,” Dr. McAfee said.

The researchers had information about the participants’ smoking histories and other details about their health and backgrounds, including diet, alcohol consumption, education levels and weight and body fat. Using records from the National Death Index, they calculated their mortality rates over time.

People who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes were not classified as smokers. Those who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes but had not had one within five years of the time the data was collected were classified as former smokers.

Not surprisingly, the study showed that the earlier a person quit smoking, the greater the impact. People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke. But there were benefits at many ages. People who quit between 35 and 44 gained about nine years, and those who stopped between 45 and 59 gained about four to six years of life expectancy.

From a public health perspective, those numbers are striking, particularly when juxtaposed with preventive measures like blood pressure screenings, colorectal screenings and mammography, the effects of which on life expectancy are more often viewed in terms of days or months, Dr. McAfee said.

“These things are very important, but the size of the benefit pales in comparison to what you can get from stopping smoking,” he said. “The notion that you could add 10 years to your life by something as straightforward as quitting smoking is just mind boggling.”

Read More..

DealBook | The Trade: An Asset So Toxic They Called It ‘Nuclear Holocaust’

On March 16, 2007, Morgan Stanley employees working on one of the toxic assets that helped blow up the world economy discussed what to name it. Among the team members’ suggestions: “Subprime Meltdown,” “Hitman,” “Nuclear Holocaust” and “Mike Tyson’s Punchout,” as well a simple yet direct reference to a bag of excrement.

Ha ha. Those hilarious investment bankers.

Then they gave it its real name and sold it to a Chinese bank.

We are never going to have a full understanding of what bad behavior bankers engaged in in the years leading up to the financial crisis. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have failed to hold big wrongdoers to account.

We are left with what scraps we can get from those private lawsuits lucky enough to get over the high hurdles for document discovery. A case brought in a New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan against Morgan Stanley by a Taiwanese bank, which bought a piece of the same deal the Chinese bank did, has cleared that bar.

The results are explosive. Hundreds of pages of internal Morgan Stanley documents, released publicly last week, shed much new light on what bankers knew at the height of the housing bubble and what they did with that secret knowledge.

The lawsuit concerns a $500 million collateralized debt obligation called Stack 2006-1, created in the first half of 2006. Collections of mortgage-backed securities, C.D.O.’s were at the heart of the financial crisis.

But the documents suggest a pattern of behavior larger than this one deal: people across the bank understood that the American housing market was in trouble. They took advantage of that knowledge to create and then bet against securities and then also to unload garbage investments on unsuspecting buyers.

Morgan Stanley doesn’t see the narrative as the plaintiffs do. The firm is fighting the lawsuit, contending that the buyers were sophisticated clients and could have known what was going on in the subprime market. The C.D.O. documents disclosed, albeit obliquely, that Morgan Stanley might bet against the securities, a strategy known as shorting. The firm did not pick the assets going into the deal (though it was able to veto any assets). And any shorting of the deal was part of a larger array of trades, both long and short. Indeed, Morgan Stanley owned a big piece of Stack, in addition to its short bet.

Regarding the profane naming contest, Morgan Stanley said in a statement: “While the e-mail in question contains inappropriate language and reflects a poor attempt at humor, the Morgan Stanley employee who wrote it was responsible for documenting transactions. It was not his job or within his skill set to assess the state of the market or the credit quality of the transaction being discussed.”

Philip Blumberg, the Morgan Stanley lawyer who composed most of the names, meet the underside of a bus, courtesy of your employer.

Another Morgan Stanley employee sent an e-mail that same morning, suggesting that the deal be called “Hitman.” This might have been an attempt to manage up, because “Hitman” was the nickname of his boss, Jonathan Horowitz, who helped head the part of the group that oversaw mortgage-backed C.D.O.’s. Mr. Horowitz replied, “I like it.”

Both Mr. Blumberg and Mr. Horowitz, now at JPMorgan, declined to comment through representatives at their banks.

In February 2006, Morgan Stanley began putting together the Stack C.D.O. According to an internal presentation, Stack “represents attractive business for Morgan Stanley.”

Why? In addition to fees, another bullet point listed: “Ability to short up to $325MM of credits into the C.D.O.” In other words, Morgan Stanley could — and did — sell assets to the Stack C.D.O., intending to profit if the securities backed by those assets declined. The bank put on a $170 million bet against Stack, even as it was selling it.

In the end, of the $500 million of assets backing the deal, $415 million ended up worthless.

“While investors and taxpayers all over the world continue to choke on Wall Street’s toxic subprime products, to this day not a single major Wall Street executive has been held accountable for misconduct relating to those products,” said Jason C. Davis, a lawyer at Robbins Geller who is representing the plaintiff in the lawsuit. “They are generally untouchable, but we are pleased that the court in this case is ordering Morgan Stanley to turn over damning evidence, so that the jury will get to see what Morgan Stanley really knew about the troubled nature of its supposedly ‘higher-than-AAA’ quality product.”

Why might Morgan Stanley have bet against the deal? Did its traders develop a brilliant thesis by assessing the fundamentals of the housing market through careful analysis of the public data? The documents suggest something more troubling: bankers found out that the housing market was diseased from their colleagues down the hall.

Bankers were getting information from fellow employees conducting and receiving private assessments of the quality of the mortgages that the bank would purchase to back securities. These reports weren’t available to the public. It would be crucial information for trading in securities backed by those kinds of mortgages.

In one e-mail from Oct. 21, 2005, a Morgan Stanley employee warned a banker that the mortgages Morgan Stanley was buying from loan originators were troubled. “The real issue is that the loan requests do not make sense,” he wrote. As an example, he cited “a borrower that makes $12K a month as an operation manger (sic) of an unknown company — after research on my part I reveal it is a tarot reading house. Compound these issues with the fact that we are seeing what I would call a lot of this type of profile.”

In another e-mail from March 17, 2006, another Morgan Stanley employee wrote about a “deteriorating appraisal quality that is very flagrant.”

Two of the employees who received those e-mails joined an internal hedge fund, headed by Howard Hubler, that was formed only the next month, in April 2006. As recounted in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short,” Mr. Hubler infamously bet against the subprime market on Morgan Stanley’s behalf, a fact that Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer conceded in late 2007. Mr. Hubler’s group was supposed to be separate from the rest of Morgan Stanley, but the two bankers continued to receive similar information about the underlying market, according to a person briefed on the matter.

At no point did they receive material, nonpublic information, a Morgan Stanley spokesman says.

I struggle to see how the private assessments that the subprime market was imploding were immaterial.

Another of Morgan Stanley’s main defenses is that it couldn’t have thought the investment it sold to the Taiwanese was terrible because it, too, lost money on securities backed by subprime mortgages. As the Morgan Stanley spokesman put it, “This deal must be viewed in the context of a significant write-down for Morgan Stanley in 2007, when the firm recorded huge losses in its public securities filings related to other subprime C.D.O. positions.”

This is a common refrain offered by big banks like Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns to absolve them of any responsibility.

But does losing money wipe away sin?

Yes, Mr. Hubler made his bets in what turned out to be a deeply disastrous way. As part of a complex array of trades, he bet against the middle slices of subprime mortgage C.D.O.’s. He bought the supposedly safe top parts. The income from the top slices helped offset the cost of betting against the middle slices. But when the market collapsed, the top slices — called “super senior” because they were supposedly safer than Triple A — didn’t hold their value, losing billions for Mr. Hubler and Morgan Stanley. Mr. Hubler did not respond to requests for comment.

So Morgan Stanley lost a great deal of money.

But let’s review what the documents suggest is the big picture.

In the fall of 2005, bank employees shared nonpublic assessments of how the subprime market was a house of tarot cards.

In February 2006, the bank began creating Stack in part so that it could bet against it.

In April 2006, the bank created its own internal hedge fund, led by Mr. Hubler, who shorted the subprime market. Among the traders in this internal shop were people who helped create Stack and other deals like it, and at least two employees who had access to the private due diligence reports.

Mr. Hubler’s group had no investment position in Stack, according to the person briefed on the matter, but it sure looks as if the bank saw what was coming and tried to position itself for a subprime market collapse.

Finally, by early 2007, the bank appeared to realize that the subprime market was faring even worse than it expected. Even the supposedly safe pieces of C.D.O.’s that it owned, including its piece of Stack, were facing losses. So Morgan Stanley bankers set to scouring the world to peddle as a safe and sound investment what its own employees were internally deriding.

Morgan Stanley declined to comment on whether it made money on its Stack investments over all. But it looks to have turned out well for the bank. In Stack, it managed to fob off a nuclear bomb to the Taiwanese bank.

Unfortunately for Morgan Stanley, it had so many other pieces of C.D.O.’s, so many nuclear warheads, that it couldn’t find nearly enough suckers around the world to buy them all.

And so when the real collapse came, Morgan Stanley was left with billions of dollars in losses.

That hardly seems exculpatory.

---

Read More..

Court Shooting Highlights Growing Gun Debate in Philippines

Bullit Marquez/Associated Press

Glen Elaine Ella removed items left in the coffin of her daughter Stephanie Nicole Ella, 7, who was hit with a stray bullet as their family watched New Year's fireworks.

MANILA — A fatal shooting in a central Philippine courtroom on Tuesday added impetus to a growing national debate over firearms regulation in a country with an enthusiastic gun culture much like America’s.

Calls for tighter controls have been prompted by a series of shootings in the last few weeks, starting with the Jan. 2 death of a 7-year-old girl who was one of about 40 people around the country hit accidentally by celebratory New Year’s gunfire. On Jan. 4, a failed local candidate opened fire on his village neighbors, killing 8 people — including a pregnant woman and child — and wounding 10. Then a gun battle at a police roadblock on Jan. 6 left 13 dead.

On Tuesday, a Canadian man, John Pope, opened fire in a courtroom in Cebu, killing a neighbor with whom he had a legal dispute and the neighbor’s lawyer. He also wounded another person before dying of a gunshot wound; officials gave varying accounts about whether Mr. Pope had shot himself or had been hit by police fire.

Filipino law allows citizens — but not foreigners — to keep guns at home, subject to registration and background-check requirements, and target shooting is a popular pastime. The country’s president, Benigno S. Aquino III, enjoys sport shooting.

Guns can usually be carried in public with a permit, but a temporary ban has been imposed in the hope of curtailing violence associated with national elections scheduled for May.

The country’s gun controls are not well enforced, said Norman Cabrera, secretary-general of the Ang Kapatiran Party, which supports tighter screening for gun permits and longer jail terms for gun crimes.

“You can go to any gun store and buy a firearm, and they will do all the paperwork for you,” Mr. Cabrera said. “You come back in a week, and you have your gun, your license — even your psychiatric test is completed for you. All these things can be worked out for you by the gun store.”

Mr. Cabrera acknowledged that it would be difficult to pass stricter gun laws in the Philippines, where the police estimate that there are 1.2 million registered firearms and about 500,000 unregistered guns in private hands among a population of about 95 million.

“We have many influences from the United States; the gun culture is one of these influences,” Mr. Cabrera said. “Unfortunately, the Philippines has adopted one of the things that is not good about the United States — its love for guns.”

Ernesto Tabujara, who heads a major gun rights group, Peaceful Responsible Owners of Guns, said gun ownership is a necessity in the Philippines,. “We have rampant crime, and the police and military are often involved,” he said. “We are not as passionate about our guns as Americans. We just want to survive.”

Nandy Pacheco, the head of Gunless Society, an advocacy group, noted ruefully that mass shootings had been so frequent lately that an episode like the courtroom shooting “is not news any more.” But it was not clear whether the revived debate over guns would yield any government action.

“People are talking about it, and legislators are talking about it,” Mr. Cabrera said. “But we don’t know if in a few weeks or months this will die down.”

Read More..

‘Atari’ Is in Trouble Again

Atari is declaring bankruptcy — twice. Both the U.S. video game company and its French parent have done so, the latest twist for the company which largely invented the video game industry and remains synonymous with it, despite having seen its glory days end by the mid-1980s.

But wait. Even though the Atari name celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year, it’s a mistake to talk about Atari as if it’s a corporate entity which has been around for four decades. (The Los Angeles Times’ Ben Fritz, for instance, refers to it as an “iconic but long-troubled video game maker.”) Instead, it’s a famous name which has drifted from owner to owner. It keeps being applied to different businesses, and yes, for all its fame, it does seem to be a bit of a jinx.

Here’s a quick rundown of what “Atari” has meant at different times (thanks, Wikipedia, for refreshing my memory):

1972-1976: It’s an up-and-coming, innovative startup cofounded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.

1976-1984: It’s part of Warner Communications (which, years later, merged with Time Inc. to form Time Warner, overlord of this website). It’s a massively successful maker of video games and consoles, but then it crashes, along with the rest of the industry.

1984-1996: Atari morphs into a semi-successful maker of PCs when it’s acquired by Tramel Technology, a company started by Jack Tramiel, the ousted founder of Commodore.

1996-1998: Tramiel runs Atari into the ground. After merging with hard-disk maker JTS, the company and brand are largely dormant.

1998-2000: Atari resurfaces under the ownership of  toy kingpin Hasbro as a line of games published under the Atari Interactive name.

2000-present: It becomes a corporate entity controlled by French game publisher Infogrames, which increasingly emphasizes the Atari moniker over its own and takes over completely in 2008. In recent years, it’s focused on digital downloads, mobile games and licensing of its familiar brand and logo.

The above chronology doesn’t account for Atari’s original business: arcade games. As far as I can tell, the arcade arm was owned at different times by Warner Communications/Time Warner (twice!), Pac-Man purveyor Namco and arcade icon Midway, among other companies. But use of the Atari brand on arcade hardware petered out in 2001.

Basically, Atari has never been one well-defined thing for more than twelve years, max, at a time. That the name has survived at all is a testament to its power and appeal. And even though the current Atari has fallen on hard times, I’ll bet that the brand survives for at least a few more decades, in one form or another. Several forms, probably.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: ‘Atari’ Is in Trouble Again
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/atari-is-in-trouble-again/
Link To Post : ‘Atari’ Is in Trouble Again
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Djokovic getting the hang of winning in Australia

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Novak Djokovic is really starting to get the hang of how to handle himself at the Australian Open.

An expression often used Down Under — "Keep your shirt on" — is designed to discourage anyone from becoming unnecessarily overexcited.

Djokovic took it literally after his 6-1, 4-6, 6-1, 6-4 win Tuesday night over fifth-seeded Tomas Berdych, advancing to the semifinals at an 11th consecutive Grand Slam tournament.

The 2-hour, 31-minute victory took exactly half the time of his five-set, fourth-round win two nights previously against Stanislas Wawrinka. In the early hours of Monday morning, Djokovic ripped his sweat-drenched shirt off and flexed his muscles, mimicking his victory celebration after the 5:53 victory over Rafael Nadal in the 2012 Australian Open final.

That was acceptable at the time to the Rod Laver Arena crowd, which was still abuzz at 1:40 a.m. following five sets of high-level tennis.

After the Berdych match, however, he realized there was no need to raise the roof. Djokovic calmly pumped his fist once and walked to the net; he later joked about the ice baths he'd taken in between matches on the advice of local hero Lleyton Hewitt.

"It was a great performance. I was hoping to have a shorter match ... just not to go over 5 hours," Djokovic said, in a comparatively subdued mood after a considerably more routine victory. "It's always going to be tough against Tomas; he's an established player. He has a big game, big serve. He can compete against anyone on any surface."

In the semifinals, Djokovic will meet No. 4-seeded David Ferrer.

Ferrer survived a quarterfinal battle with fellow Spaniard Nicolas Almagro. Almagro had three chances to serve for the match, but Ferrer broke each time.

A usually mild-mannered pro, Ferrer showed his aggression at times when he threatened to spike his racket and even smashed his water bottle in the changeover after he'd dropped serve in a frustrating fourth set that featured eight breaks of serve.

He'd never lost to Almagro in 12 previous meetings and, as the No. 1 Spaniard in the draw in the absence of 11-time major winner Rafael Nadal, felt a responsibility to reach the semis.

"It was (a) miracle I won this match," Ferrer said of his comeback 4-6, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 (4), 6-2 win. "I tried to fight every point; that's my game. I always fight."

Ferrer survived once in the third set and twice in the fourth when Almagro was serving for the match, but held his nerve and finally advanced to his third semifinal in the last four Grand Slam events.

"In the important moments, I played more consistent in my game," Ferrer said. "Of course, in the next round, the semifinals, I need to play my best tennis, better than today."

Djokovic acknowledged Ferrer's work ethic, saying the 30-year-old Spaniard was "one of the most respected guys on the tour because he never gives up."

"He plays every single match of his career with 100 percent," Djokovic said.

"I'm expecting a long one," he added.

Ferrer has never been past a major semifinal.

There are only three men left in the draw who have won Grand Slam titles — Djokovic has won five, including the last two in Australia. He's aiming to be the first man in the Open era to win three consecutive Australian titles.

The other two are in action Wednesday, with 17-time Grand Slam winner Roger Federer against 2008 Australian finalist Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France. Andy Murray, who broke the 76-year drought for British men at the major tournaments by winning the U.S. Open last year, will play Jeremy Chardy of France.

On the women's side, defending champion Victoria Azarenka faces Svetlana Kuznetsova, who has won the U.S. Open and the French Open, and 15-time major winner Serena Williams is against 19-year-old American Sloane Stephens, who is playing her first quarterfinal at a Grand Slam.

Maria Sharapova completed a career Grand Slam last year by winning the French Open, a few months after losing the Australian Open final to Azarenka. After her 6-2, 6-2 quarterfinal win over Ekatrina Makarova on Tuesday, she has conceded only nine games in five matches — a record in Australia.

"To be honest, those are not the stats you want to be known for," Sharapova said.

After opening with a pair of 6-0, 6-0 wins, Sharapova thrashed seven-time major winner Venus Williams 6-1, 6-3 in the third round and Belgian Kristen Flipkens 6-0, 6-1 in the fourth.

Li Na has reached the semifinals in three of the last four years at Melbourne Park after beating Agnieszka Radwanska 7-5, 6-3. The 30-year-old Chinese player lost the 2011 final in Australia to Kim Clijsters, then won her breakthrough Grand Slam at the French Open a few months later. She hasn't been back to a major final since.

Djokovic won his first major title in Australia in 2008, then didn't make another final in his next 11 Grand Slam events. He's won four since then and is the top-ranked man in tennis, crediting the lessons from his experiences back then.

"At the start of my career, I went through a lot of different kinds of challenges physically, mentally," he said. "Everybody makes mistakes. I was aware of the fact that I need to improve because I wasn't feeling well, especially in the heat. I had lots of health issues.

"I don't want to go through it again. I am aware of the importance of an everyday practice and recovery basis. So as long as it's like that, I think I'll be all right."

Read More..

The Well Column: Facing Cancer, a Stark Choice

In the 1970s, women’s health advocates were highly suspicious of mastectomies. They argued that surgeons — in those days, pretty much an all-male club — were far too quick to remove a breast after a diagnosis of cancer, with disfiguring results.

But today, the pendulum has swung the other way. A new generation of women want doctors to take a more aggressive approach, and more and more are asking that even healthy breasts be removed to ward off cancer before it can strike.

Researchers estimate that as many as 15 percent of women with breast cancer — 30,000 a year — opt to have both breasts removed, up from less than 3 percent in the late 1990s. Notably, it appears that the vast majority of these women have never received genetic testing or counseling and are basing the decision on exaggerated fears about their risk of recurrence.

In addition, doctors say an increasing number of women who have never had a cancer diagnosis are demanding mastectomies based on genetic risk. (Cancer databases don’t track these women, so their numbers are unknown.)

“We are confronting almost an epidemic of prophylactic mastectomy,” said Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian, a surgical oncologist at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “I think the medical community has taken notice. We don’t have data that say oncologically this is a necessity, so why are women making this choice?”

One reason may be the never-ending awareness campaigns that have left many women in perpetual fear of the disease. Improvements in breast reconstruction may also be driving the trend, along with celebrities who go public with their decision to undergo preventive mastectomy.

This month Allyn Rose, a 24-year-old Miss America contestant from Washington, D.C., made headlines when she announced plans to have both her healthy breasts removed after the pageant; both her mother and her grandmother died from breast cancer. The television personality Giuliana Rancic, 37, and the actress Christina Applegate, 41, also talked publicly about having double mastectomies after diagnoses of early-stage breast cancer.

“You’re not going to find other organs that people cut out of their bodies because they’re worried about disease,” said the medical historian Dr. Barron H. Lerner, author of “The Breast Cancer Wars” (2001). “Because breast cancer is a disease that is so emotionally charged and gets so much attention, I think at times women feel almost obligated to be as proactive as possible — that’s the culture of breast cancer.”

Most of the data on prophylactic mastectomy come from the University of Minnesota, where researchers tracked contralateral mastectomy trends (removing a healthy breast alongside one with cancer) from 1998 to 2006. Dr. Todd M. Tuttle, chief of surgical oncology, said double mastectomy rates more than doubled during that period and the rise showed no signs of slowing.

From those trends as well as anecdotal reports, Dr. Tuttle estimates that at least 15 percent of women who receive a breast cancer diagnosis will have the second, healthy breast removed. “It’s younger women who are doing it,” he said.

The risk that a woman with breast cancer will develop cancer in the other breast is about 5 percent over 10 years, Dr. Tuttle said. Yet a University of Minnesota study found that women estimated their risk to be more than 30 percent.

“I think there are women who markedly overestimate their risk of getting cancer,” he said.

Most experts agree that double mastectomy is a reasonable option for women who have a strong genetic risk and have tested positive for a breast cancer gene. That was the case with Allison Gilbert, 42, a writer in Westchester County who discovered her genetic risk after her grandmother died of breast cancer and her mother died of ovarian cancer.

Even so, she delayed the decision to get prophylactic mastectomy until her aunt died from an aggressive breast cancer. In August, she had a double mastectomy. (She had her ovaries removed earlier.)

“I feel the women in my family didn’t have a way to avoid their fate,” said Ms. Gilbert, author of the 2011 book “Parentless Parents,” about how losing a parent influences one’s own style of parenting. “Here I was given an incredible opportunity to know what I have and to do something about it and, God willing, be around for my kids longer.”

Even so, she said her decisions were not made lightly. The double mastectomy and reconstruction required an initial 11 1/2-hour surgery and an “intense” recovery. She got genetic counseling, joined support groups and researched her options.

But doctors say many women are not making such informed decisions. Last month, University of Michigan researchers reported on a study of more than 1,446 women who had breast cancer. Four years after their diagnosis, 35 percent were considering removing their healthy breast and 7 percent had already done so.

Notably, most of the women who had a double mastectomy were not at high risk for a cancer recurrence. In fact, studies suggest that most women who have double mastectomies never seek genetic testing or counseling.

“Breast cancer becomes very emotional for people, and they view a breast differently than an arm or a required body part that you use every day,” said Sarah T. Hawley, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan. “Women feel like it’s a body part over which they totally have a choice, and they say, ‘I want to put this behind me — I don’t want to worry about it anymore.’ ”

---

We hope you’ll “Like” Well on Facebook, where you’ll find news and conversations about fitness, food and family health.

Read More..

Square Feet: Pittsburgh Seeks to Expand Riverfront Access to the Public

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh exists for three reasons: the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio.

In the 20th century, the banks of those rivers were controlled by industrial behemoths. They largely lost that identity after the waning of the steel industry in the 1980s. Over the last two decades, however, the city’s progress in clearing and cleaning its waterfront has created 12 miles of recreational trails, three professional sports stadiums, several boat landings and an influx of nearly 2,000 new downtown residents.

The city has managed to leverage a $124 million investment in publicly accessible riverfront into $4 billion in corporate, public, nonprofit and entertainment development downtown.

That success has renewed a debate that would have been unthinkable in Pittsburgh’s polluted industrial heyday: how best to expand public access to the shorelines of the three rivers. Projects proposed for two of the largest tracts left to be developed on the downtown fringe illustrate the opportunities and limits of public-private partnerships.

This month, the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority approved preliminary plans for an $80 million to $90 million investment in new roads, streets and utilities on a 178-acre former industrial site that is the biggest remaining waterfront property in the city. The developers will use a tool called tax increment financing, which earmarks a portion of a site’s future property taxes to build its infrastructure. Such financing, approved by both the authority and the City Council on a case-by-case basis, has galvanized redevelopment on Pittsburgh’s complex industrial sites.

The latest project, which uses the acronym Almono for the city’s three rivers, is a case in point. It envisions a $900 million office, industrial and residential development on a former steel and coke manufacturing site on the Monongahela River that closed in 1997.

In 2002, an alliance of four philanthropies bought the property for $10 million to protect it for postindustrial development. “It was a once-in-a-century opportunity to develop the riverfront, and we thought foundations, as nonprofit owners, could supply patient money,” said William P. Getty, president of the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation.

The current Almono partnership comprises the Heinz Endowments, the Benedum Foundation and an affiliate of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. It is managed by the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania, a nonprofit economic development group.

The former industrial site occupies a strategic location between downtown and two rapidly expanding research institutions, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. Both universities lease space in the adjacent Pittsburgh Technology Park. Carnegie Mellon also conducts robotics field testing at the Almono site.

Donald F. Smith Jr., president of the development corporation, says the partnership is talking with both universities about their futures at the site. “The universities are important players,” he noted. “They will have space needs for their tech transfer efforts.”

Private developers will be asked to submit proposals for four interconnected zones on the Monongahela River that will include two million square feet of office space, research and clean manufacturing, and 1,200 residential units. The master plan developed by the Rothschild Doyno Collaborative, an architecture and urban design firm, calls for alternative technologies for energy generation and storm and wastewater management, along with 25 acres of parks, trails and river access. The design also suggests new uses for a few historic structures, like a rail yard roundhouse and a 1,300-foot-long steel mill.

“Riverfront access, beautification and redevelopment of the entire neighborhood is important,” said Jim Richter, executive director of the Hazelwood Initiative, a community development organization.

While plans include continued traffic on a CSX rail line through the site, a proposed highway has been suspended because of its $4 billion price tag and community opposition.

Read More..

World Briefing | Africa: South Africa: Nigerian Convicted of Planning Deadly Bombings

A South African court on Monday said a Nigerian man was guilty of masterminding twin car bombings in Nigeria in 2010. The double bombing in Nigeria’s capital killed at least 12 people and wounded three dozen. The defendant, Henry Okah, faces a minimum sentence of life in prison, said the prosecutor, Shaun Abrahams. “This is clearly indicative that South Africa cannot be seen as a safe haven for international terrorists,” Mr. Abrahams said. Mr. Okah was arrested in Johannesburg one day after the bombings. He is a leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.

Read More..

Samsung decides to kick RIM when it’s down by bashing BlackBerry in new ad [video]

Samsung (005930) is well known for its clever ads mocking Apple (AAPL) and its fans, but the company has decided to pick on a less powerful target in its newest ad that takes swipes RIM (RIMM) and its BlackBerry smartphones. The ad revolves around an office that is implementing its own bring-your-own-device policy and is meant to show that both the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II are ideal business phones that can enable greater creativity. While most workers in the ad happily switch to Samsung smartphones after the BYOD policy is put in place, one of them insists on clinging to his BlackBerry, which prompts one of his coworkers to ask, “Are you finally going to retire that thing?” The full video is posted below.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 OS walkthrough, BlackBerry Z10 pricing]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..