Stocks surge after eurozone agreement

Brendan Mcdermid / REUTERS

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

By msnbc.com news services

Stocks surged Friday as investors cheered an agreement by European leaders to stabilize the region's banks, a pact that helped remove some of the uncertainty that has been plaguing markets.

The broad rally saw the Dow Jones industrial average tack on 278 points and chalk up its best day since June 6.

Still, for the quarter the broader stock market ended lower, down 3.3 percent, marking the first down quarter for the benchmark S&P 500-stock index in the last three after inconclusive Greek elections and concerns about the solvency of Spanish banks roiled financial markets around the world.

The S&P 500 is up 8.3 percent since the start of 2012.

Crucially, euro-zone leaders agreed that countries would be able to recapitalize banks directly without increasing a country's budget deficit.

Such a move serves to end the cycle markets fell into when policymakers bailed out Spanish banks to the tune of $125 billion, but ended up further extending the indebtedness of the Spanish state and shunting existing bondholders down the food chain.

"The key is in separating the banking system from the sovereign system and they had to have seen that," said Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment strategist at Windham Financial Services in Charlotte, Vermont.

"The answer was obvious and (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel made a lot of noise before the meeting and I guess she saw the handwriting on the wall."

Policymakers also agreed to discuss a proposal for a pan-bloc banking union and said they wouldn't force countries that comply with EU budget rules to adopt extra austerity measures or economic reforms.

In addition to the boost the EU agreement gave to the Wall Street rally, investors cited end-of-quarter portfolio adjustments, including reallocation to bonds from stocks after bonds outperformed stocks by a wide margin this month.

Sectors that have been among the most sensitive to developments in the euro zone led gains. U.S. bank stocks were among the market leaders.

Related: Euro deal leaves deep divisions, lingering questions

Italian and Spanish borrowing costs fell, though they remained not far from recent highs. Market expectations for any action during a two-day European Union summit had all but vanished, giving markets room to bounce on good news.

Brent and U.S. crude oil prices soared on the back of the EU agreement.

The EU summit news overshadowed a batch of mixed U.S. data. U.S. consumer spending stalled in May as auto purchases flagged while consumer sentiment hit a six-month low in June in the latest signs of trouble for the economy.

Although another report on Friday showed manufacturing activity in the Midwest picked up this month, factories saw a modest decline in new orders.

Attention in Europe now turns to next week's European Central Bank meeting. The consensus is that the bank will cut its main refinancing rate by 25 basis points to 0.75 percent and may trim the deposit rate - the rate it pays banks for parking money with it - by 25 basis points to 0 percent.

"You have more fireworks coming next week when the ECB meets on the fifth because I have to believe they are going to cut their interest rates by at least a half to stimulate growth," said Mendelsohn.

Among the few Wall Street decliners, U.S.-traded shares of Research in Motion tumbled in the wake of the company's decision on Thursday to delay the make-or-break launch of its next-generation BlackBerry phones until next year.

Nike shares dropped a day after the world's largest sportswear maker missed quarterly profit estimates for the first time in at least two years.

Ford Motor Co fell after the automaker became the latest large multinational to warn on weakness stemming from Europe, joining the likes of Procter & Gamble Co.

But shares of KB Homes jumped after the fifth-largest U.S. homebuilder reported a narrower second-quarter loss, helped by higher sale prices and net orders.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Art Cashin, UBS, weighs in on whether the EU deal is enough to sustain a market rally.

Source: http://marketday.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/29/12484776-stocks-surge-after-agreement-in-eurozone?lite

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Iran warns EU of 'repercussions' over new sanctions

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Scientists measure soot particles in flight

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

"For the first time we can actually see the structure of individual aerosol particles floating in air, their 'native habitat'," said DESY scientist Henry Chapman from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) in Hamburg. "This will have important implications for various fields from climate modelling to human health." CFEL is a joint venture of Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, the German Max Planck Society and the University of Hamburg.

Aerosol particles like soot play important roles in a wide range of fields from toxicology to climate science. Despite their importance, their properties are surprisingly difficult to measure: Visible light doesn't provide the necessary resolution, X-ray sources are usually not bright enough to image single particles, and for electron microscopy particles have to be collected onto a substrate, which potentially alters their structure and encourages agglomeration.

Using the world's most powerful X-ray laser LCLS at the U.S. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford (California), the team captured images of single soot particles floating through the laser beam. "We now have a richer imaging tool to explore the connections between their toxicity and internal structure," said SLAC's Duane Loh, lead author of the study appearing in this week's scientific journal Nature. Free-electron lasers like LCLS or the European XFEL currently being built in Hamburg consist of particle accelerators that send unbound (free) electrons on a tight slalom course where they emit X-ray light.

The study focused on particles less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter. This is the size range of particles that efficiently transport into the human lungs and constitute the second most important contribution to global warming. Microscopic soot particles were generated with electric sparks from a graphite block and fed with a carrier gas of argon and nitrogen into a device called an aerodynamic lens, that produces a thin beam of air with entrained soot particles. This aerosol beam intercepted the pulsed laser beam. Whenever an X-ray laser pulse hit a soot particle, it produced a characteristic diffraction pattern that was recorded by a detector. From this pattern, the scientists were able to reconstruct the soot particle's structure.

"The structure of soot determines how it scatters light, which is an important part of understanding how the energy of the sun is absorbed by the earth's atmosphere. This is a key factor in models of the earth's climate," explained co-author Andrew Martin from DESY. "There also are many links between airborne particles around two micrometres in size and adverse health effects. Using the free-electron laser we are now able to measure the shape and composition of individual airborne particles. This may lead to a better understanding of how these particles interfere with the function of cells in the lungs."

The team recorded patterns from 174 individual soot particles and measured their compactness, using a property called fractal dimension. "We've seen that the fractal dimension is higher than what was thought," said Chapman. "This means that soot in the air is compact, which has implications for the modelling of climate effects." Also, the structure of the airborne soot seems to be surprisingly variable. "There is quite some variation in the fractal dimension, which implies that a lot of rearrangement is going on in the air," explains Chapman.

A primary long-term goal of the research is to take snapshots of airborne particles as they change their size, shape and chemical make-up in response to their environment, explained Michael Bogan from SLAC, who led the research. "Scientists can now imagine being able to watch the evolution of soot formation in combustion engines from their molecular building blocks, or maybe even view the first steps of ice crystal formation in clouds."

In real-world settings soot is seldom pure. To see the effects of mixing with other aerosols, the researchers added salt spray to the soot particles, resulting in larger particles with soot attached to the tiny salt crystals. Such composite particles might form in coastal cities and are expected to have a much larger climate effect than soot alone. Composite aerosols are more difficult to analyse, but the new technique could clearly discern between soot, salt and mixtures of both. As the aerosol particles are vaporized by the intense X-ray laser pulse, the researchers could use mass spectroscopy to examine the composition of each individual particle imaged.

Even though the aerosol particles are destroyed by the X-ray laser pulse, the pulse is so short that it out-runs this destruction. Therefore the diffraction patterns are of high quality and represent the undamaged object. The novel X-ray technique can find wide application to study all sorts of aerosols and can also be extended to resolve the static and dynamic morphology of general ensembles of disordered particles, the researchers state.

"We are now able to study the structure of soot by measuring individual particles in a large ensemble," explains Martin. "Biological samples, like cells and large proteins, have a similar size to the soot particles we studied and also lack a fixed, reproducible structure. In the future it may be possible to extend these techniques beyond aerosols, to study the structural variations in biological systems."

The research team included contributors from SLAC, DESY, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institutes, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Cornell University, the University of Hamburg, Synchrotron Trieste and Uppsala University. LCLS is supported by DOE's Office of Science.

###

Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres: http://www.helmholtz.de/en/index.html

Thanks to Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres for this article.

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Issa challenges Obama executive privilege claim

WASHINGTON (AP) ? With a vote looming to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, a House committee chairman is challenging President Barack Obama's claim of executive privilege, invoked to maintain secrecy for some documents related to a failed gun-tracking operation.

Obama's claim broadly covers administration documents about the program called Operation Fast and Furious, not just those prepared for the president. But Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that recommended the contempt charge, maintains the privilege is reserved for documents to and from the president and his most senior advisers.

Behind the legal argument is a political dispute. House Republican leaders are pressing for a contempt vote against Holder that is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, the same day the Supreme Court will rule on the legality of the nation's health care law.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House Democrats' chief head counter, said he expected some Democrats to follow the National Rifle Association's call for a "yes" vote on contempt. The NRA has written to all members of Congress, saying the White House wanted to use the Operation Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation to advance a gun control agenda.

Hoyer would not give a number of potential defectors.

In a letter to the president dated Monday and made public Tuesday, Issa cited an appellate court decision to back his claim and questioned whether Obama was asserting a presidential power "solely for the purpose of further obstructing a congressional investigation."

White House Spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday that Issa's analysis "has as much merit as his absurd contention that Operation Fast and Furious was created in order to promote gun control. Our position is consistent with executive branch legal precedent for the past three decades spanning administrations of both parties."

Courts have routinely "affirmed the right of the executive branch to invoke the privilege even when White House documents are not involved," Schultz said.

Some experts agree with the president's view that all executive branch documents are protected from disclosure. Ohio State University law professor Peter Shane, a specialist in presidential power, says executive privilege historically covers documents generated anywhere in the executive branch.

Holder's offer last week to turn over some documents ? the Justice Department has provided 7,600 records so far ? was rejected by Issa because he contended the attorney general was demanding an end to the committee's investigation.

Ironically, the documents at the heart of the current argument are not directly related to the workings of Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed guns to "walk" from Arizona to Mexico in hopes they could be tracked.

Rather, Issa wants internal communications from February 2011, when the administration denied knowledge of gun-walking, to the end of the year, when officials acknowledged the denial was in error. Those documents covered a period after Fast and Furious was shut down.

In Fast and Furious, agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona abandoned the agency's usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal of gun-walking was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers who long had eluded prosecution and to dismantle their networks.

Gun-walking long has been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in at least two investigations during the George W. Bush administration before Fast and Furious. These experiments came as the department was under widespread criticism that the old policy of arresting every suspected low-level "straw purchaser" was still allowing tens of thousands of guns to reach Mexico. A straw purchaser is an illicit buyer of guns for others.

The agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in Operation Fast and Furious. The low point of the operation came in Arizona in 2010, when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a firefight with a group of armed Mexican bandits and two guns traced to the operation were found at the scene.

Issa, in his letter to the president, wrote, "Courts have consistently held that the assertion of the constitutionally-based executive privilege ... is only applicable ... to documents and communications that implicate the confidentiality of the president's decision-making process."

The letter said that while the privilege covers only the president and his advisers, it is a qualified privilege that can be overcome by a showing of the committee's need for the documents.

Shane, the Ohio State professor, said: "Executive privilege is really an umbrella concept that encompasses a variety of privileges. History's most famous claim of executive privilege ? President Richard Nixon's unsuccessful attempt to withhold the Watergate tapes ? was an example of 'presidential privacy privilege.' That privilege covers executive communications when the president is involved."

He said the executive branch historically claims a much broader privilege, the so-called deliberative privilege. That claim tries to protect documents generated anywhere in the executive branch that embody only the executive's internal deliberations, not final policy decisions. The current dispute involves deliberative privilege, he said.

Issa quoted from a 1997 case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in which the court said the privilege should not extend to staff outside the White House in executive branch agencies.

Rather, the court said, it should apply only to "communications authored or solicited and received by those members of an immediate White House adviser's staff" with responsibility for formulating advice for the president.

However, the case which Issa repeatedly cited in his letter distinguishes carefully between the "presidential communications privilege" and the "deliberative process privilege." In that case, the court dealt only with the presidential communication privilege but observed that both the communications privilege and the deliberative privilege are executive privileges designed to protect the confidentiality of executive branch decision-making. It's the deliberative process privilege that Obama invoked in the current dispute over Operation Fast and Furious.

President George W. Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time in his administration to block a congressional committee trying to review documents about a decades-long scandal involving FBI misuse of mob informants in Boston.

___

Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this story.

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Science with impact

Public release date: 27-Jun-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sarah Blackford
s.blackford@lancaster.ac.uk
44-777-176-5335
Society for Experimental Biology

Plant and animal scientists are working together to meet the challenges of climate change. Research, to be presented at the Society for experimental Biology on 28th June will demonstrate innovative techniques and insights into ways in which science is addressing food security issues, crop yields and diminishing fish stocks.

In seven out of the past ten years supply yields of the world's four most important crops has fallen short of demand, leading to price spikes that affect animal production and the cost of most foods. It is estimated that the world will need 70% more of these crops by 2050, yet at the current and declining rate of yield improvement this target will not be met. Meeting this challenge is going to require the development of innovative strategies which make use of our unprecedented knowledge of biology. Developing new, low input, high yielding varieties of wheat, will be fundamental to meeting these 2050 goals. Genetic improvement of the yield potential of the major grain and seed crops has accounted for about half of the increase in global production of primary foodstuffs.

Climate change and its effects on (marine) ecosystems also emphasise the need for a common understanding of the climate sensitivity of organisms by physiologists and ecologists. An understanding of physiological mechanisms in an ecological context also provides benefits to the assessment of climate change impacts on living resources and associated tools for management and policy.

###

---

[ | 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.

Public release date: 27-Jun-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sarah Blackford
s.blackford@lancaster.ac.uk
44-777-176-5335
Society for Experimental Biology

Plant and animal scientists are working together to meet the challenges of climate change. Research, to be presented at the Society for experimental Biology on 28th June will demonstrate innovative techniques and insights into ways in which science is addressing food security issues, crop yields and diminishing fish stocks.

In seven out of the past ten years supply yields of the world's four most important crops has fallen short of demand, leading to price spikes that affect animal production and the cost of most foods. It is estimated that the world will need 70% more of these crops by 2050, yet at the current and declining rate of yield improvement this target will not be met. Meeting this challenge is going to require the development of innovative strategies which make use of our unprecedented knowledge of biology. Developing new, low input, high yielding varieties of wheat, will be fundamental to meeting these 2050 goals. Genetic improvement of the yield potential of the major grain and seed crops has accounted for about half of the increase in global production of primary foodstuffs.

Climate change and its effects on (marine) ecosystems also emphasise the need for a common understanding of the climate sensitivity of organisms by physiologists and ecologists. An understanding of physiological mechanisms in an ecological context also provides benefits to the assessment of climate change impacts on living resources and associated tools for management and policy.

###

---

[ | 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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How Many Neutrons and Protons Can Get Along? Maybe 7,000

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Crayolascope hacks toys into foot-thick 3D display

Artist Blair Neal, as many other great creators have before him, turned to children's toys as the source of inspiration for his latest project. Crayolascope is a rudimentary 3D display hacked together from several Glow Books, a light-up play on a flip-book from the titular company. The installation, currently housed at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing, layers 12 of its component clear plastic sheets to create a roughly one-foot deep display that plays a simple pre-drawn animation. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino Mega, that can either play back the neon scribbles at varying speeds (controlled by a knob built into the console) or scrub through frame by frame. Neal isn't quite done tweaking the Crayolascope either. As it stands he's limited to between 14 and 18 frames, before it becomes too difficult to see through the sheets. And it requires near total darkness for optimal operation. To see it in action check out the video after the break.

Continue reading Crayolascope hacks toys into foot-thick 3D display

Crayolascope hacks toys into foot-thick 3D display originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jun 2012 16:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Condors threatened by 'epidemic' lead poisoning from hunters' bullets (+video)

A review of more than 1,154 blood samples taken from wild California?condors?and tested from 1997 to 2010 found that 48 percent of the birds had?lead?levels so high, they could have died without treatment.

By Paul Rogers,?San Jose Mercury News (MCT) / June 26, 2012

A two-year old male California condor soars in the Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary, in April, 2001, near Big Sur, Calif.

Ben Margot/AP/File

Enlarge

California?condors, one of the world?s most endangered species, are poisoned by?lead?from hunters? bullets ?at epidemic levels,? and will not recover unless more is done to prevent it, a study released Monday concluded.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
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'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "off"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // --> In the early 1980s, the number of California Condors had plummeted from decades of poaching and environmental hazards, but as Bill Whitaker reports, scientists are hard at work to save the endangered species from extinction.

A review of more than 1,154 blood samples taken from wild California?condors?and tested from 1997 to 2010 found that 48 percent of the birds had?lead?levels so high, they could have died without treatment.

So far, a ban on?lead?bullets in the birds? habitat appears to have had little effect, the study found.

?Lead?poisoning is preventing the recovery of California?condors,? said Myra Finkelstein, a research toxicologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was a?lead?author of the study. ?The population is not self-sustaining.?

Condors?? the birds with the largest wingspan in North America ? are scavengers. They eat dead deer, pigs and other animals, often that hunters have shot. They ingest bullet fragments and are poisoned.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law in 2007 to ban hunting with?lead?bullets, slugs or buckshot in the?condors? range, which extends from Los Angeles to San Jose, where the birds have been seen atop Mount Hamilton. But it hasn?t worked. Birds analyzed before the law took effect had blood levels the same as birds analyzed afterward.

The reason, said Finkelstein, is that a?condor?eat 75 to 150 dead animals a year.

?If just one has a?lead?bullet fragment, that can be enough to kill the bird,? she said.

Condors?once ranged from British Columbia to Mexico. But because of habitat loss, hunting and?lead?poisoning, the population dwindled to just 22 nationwide by 1982.

Federal biologists captured all remaining wild?condors?in 1987 and began breeding them in zoos. The birds? offspring have been gradually released back to the wild.

Today the California?condor?population has grown to 386. Of those, 213 live in the wild at Big Sur, Pinnacles National Monument in San Benito County, Southern California, Arizona, Utah and Mexico. The other 173condors?live in captivity, at places such as the Los Angeles Zoo.

Although the population growth has been impressive, it is deceptive because it is highly dependent upon human intervention, the researchers said in Monday?s study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Every free-flying?condor?has a radio or GPS collar to track it. Nearly all of them are captured twice a year and tested for?lead. A few chicks have been born in the wild, but biologists still put out out food, such as stillborn calves, for the birds to eat so their population can have a chance to grow.

Monday?s study, which also looked at?lead?levels in?condor?feathers, confirmed that?lead?in the birds is coming from bullets, rather than other sources such as old paint chips, by matching isotope levels of?lead?in bullets tolead?in the?condors.

Researchers were surprised, Finkelstein said, by the extensive poisoning.

For example, 30 percent of all?condors?captured every year have?lead?levels that, while not potentially fatal, can block reproduction and cause immune system problems.

And 20 percent of the birds captured every year have levels that could kill them if not treated with chelation, a process where?condors?are fed calcium-based drugs that bind to the?lead?and help them pass it naturally. But the process also strips nutrients, and can cause the birds to be hospitalized a month or more.

In California, the state Department of Fish and Game and some hunting and environmental groups have worked to promote the?lead?ban in?condor?habitat. Some surveys show high compliance rates. But there is little enforcement, and ranchers or hunters can still use?lead?bullets and shot, which are cheaper and more readily available than other types of ammunition, such as copper, with little risk of getting caught.

Tthe Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Tucson, Ariz., and six other conservation groups sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this month to force the agency to institute controls or bans on?lead?ammunition.

?We?ve removed toxic?lead?from gasoline, paint and most products exposing humans to?lead?poisoning, now it?s time to do the same for hunting ammunition to protect America?s wildlife,? said Jeff Miller, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity.

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Michael Jackson Death Anniversary Celebrates King of Pop's Life

June 25 is Michael Jackson's death anniversary. The King of Pop died three years ago today at the age of 50 after suffering cardiac arrest at his home.

The coroner ruled it a homicide, and Dr. Conrad Murray, who was over-medicating MJ to a dangerous degree, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

Murray obviously did not mean to kill Jackson, but was nonetheless responsible for the fatal combination of sedatives that led to the singer's demise.

Serving a four-year sentence, and complaining that he is wasting away in jail amid horrid conditions, Murray has been behind bars since November.

Michael may be gone, but three years later, his legacy lives on.

In a way, MJ passing away shifted the focus back to his musical greatness and away from the personal problems and eccentricities that dominated news.

Jackson’s mother, Katherine, has permanent custody of his offspring, all three of which have all gone on to become well-adjusted, normal children.

Just what he would have wanted, and worked so hard to achieve.

Musically, his death introduced Jackson to a new generation of fans and invigorated tens of millions of older ones. He hasn't been this popular in 30 years!

For much more MJ, check out our Michael Jackson video section!

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