Source: nutupgators.com --- Saturday, February 23, 2013
Most seem to assume the Florida Gators will exact payback tonight on the Arkansas Razorbacks. ...
Source: http://nutupgators.com/?p=34556
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GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) ? Sandy Koufax hadn't worn a major league uniform for more than two decades until the Dodgers got him back in blue this spring.
The beloved left-hander is in camp with Los Angeles as a special instructor, doling out advice and experience to young players who haven't forgotten his singular achievements during an all-too-brief career.
During a rare interview, the 77-year-old Koufax says he doesn't know why so many people think he's reclusive and shy. He's grateful simply to talk pitching with the Dodgers, saying it might be the only thing he's ever been good at.
Manager Don Mattingly says the three-time Cy Young Award winner is just one of the guys during spring, although he read a list of Koufax's accomplishments to the team just to make sure everybody knew.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sandy-koufax-welcomed-back-spring-training-203756536--mlb.html
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? Even before she takes office Monday as South Korea's first female president, Park Geun-hye's campaign vow to soften Seoul's current hard-line approach to rival North Korea is being tested by Pyongyang's recent underground nuclear detonation.
Pyongyang, Washington, Beijing and Tokyo are all watching to see if Park, the daughter of a staunchly anti-communist dictator, pursues an ambitious engagement policy meant to ease five years of animosity on the divided peninsula or if she sticks with the tough stance of her fellow conservative predecessor, Lee Myung-bak.
Park's decision is important because it will likely set the tone of the larger diplomatic approach that Washington and others take in stalled efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.
It will also be complicated by North Korea's warning of unspecified "second and third measures of greater intensity," a threat that comes as Washington and others push for tightened U.N. sanctions as punishment for the Feb. 12 atomic test, the North's third since 2006.
That test is seen as another step toward North Korea's goal of building a bomb small enough to be mounted on a missile that can hit the United States. The explosion, which Pyongyang called a response to U.S. hostility, triggered global outrage.
Park has said she won't yet change her policy, which was built with the high probability of provocations from Pyongyang in mind. But some aren't sure if engagement can work, given North Korea's choice of "bombs over electricity," as American scientist Siegfried Hecker puts it.
"Normalization of relations, a peace treaty, access to energy and economic opportunities ? those things that come from choosing electricity over bombs and have the potential of lifting the North Korean people out of poverty and hardship ? will be made much more difficult, if not impossible, for at least the next five years," Hecker, a regular visitor to North Korea, said in a posting on the website of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.
As she takes office, however, Park will be mindful that many South Koreans are frustrated at the state of inter-Korean relations after the Lee government's five-year rule, which saw two nuclear tests, three long-range rocket launches and attacks blamed on North Korea that killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.
Park's policy calls for strong defense but also for efforts to build trust through aid shipments, reconciliation talks and the resumption of some large-scale economic initiatives as progress occurs on the nuclear issue. Park has also held out the possibility of a summit with new North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Much is riding on Park's conclusion.
"The overall policy direction on North Korea among the U.S., Japan and South Korea will be hers to decide," said Victor Cha, a former senior Asia adviser to President George W. Bush. "If Park Geun-hye wants to contain, the U.S. will support that. But if Park Geun-hye, months down the road, wants to engage, then the U.S. will go along with that too. "
Engagement by Park would provide a sharp contrast with the rule of her father, Park Chung-hee, whose antipathy toward Pyongyang during his 18-year rule in the 1960s and '70s prompted a failed attack on the Blue House by 31 North Korean commandos in 1968. In 1974, Park's wife was shot and killed by a Japan-born Korean claiming he was acting on assassination orders by North Korea founder and then leader Kim Il Sung.
Critics say Park Geun-hye's North Korea policy lacks specifics. They also question how far she can go given her conservative base's strong anti-Pyongyang sentiments.
But Park has previously confounded ideological expectations. She travelled to Pyongyang in 2002 and held private talks with the late Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un, and her gifts to Kim Jong Il are showcased in a museum of gifts to the North Korean leaders. During the often contentious presidential campaign, she responded to liberal criticism by reaching out to the families of victims of her father's dictatorship.
She said in her 2007 autobiography that she visited Pyongyang because she thought her painful experiences with the North made her "the one who could resolve South-North relations better than anyone else." She also wrote that Kim Jong Il apologized for the 1968 attack.
"I don't think this latest spike in the cycle of provocation and response undermines her whole platform of seeking to somehow re-engage the North," said John Delury, an analyst at Seoul's Yonsei University. North Korea wants a return of large-scale aid and investment from South Korea.
Before the election, Pyongyang's state media repeatedly questioned the sincerity of Park's engagement overture. Since the election, however, although regular criticism of Lee as "human scum" continues, the North's official Korean Central News Agency hasn't mentioned Park by name, though her political party is still condemned.
Pyongyang sees the nuclear crisis as a U.S.-North Korea issue, Delury said. "From a North Korean mindset, ramping up the tension and hostility with the U.S. does not equal jettisoning relations with the South."
Park may take a wait-and-see stance in coming months.
A possible positive turning point could come if North Korea resists tests or launches during April, when it celebrates two state anniversaries ? Kim Il Sung's birthday and the army's founding anniversary ? according to analyst Hong Hyun-ik at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea. Pyongyang conducted a failed long-range rocket launch during last year's celebrations.
Hong predicts that the United States will seek nuclear talks with North Korea in a few months, something that could help Park's efforts to engage North Korea.
"The nuclear test sets back and complicates but does not necessarily doom her engagement efforts over the long term," said Ralph Cossa, president of Pacific Forum CSIS, a Hawaii-based think tank.
Park warned after the test that North Korea faces international isolation, economic difficulties and, eventually, a collapse if it continues to build its atomic program. She also pressed Pyongyang to respond to her overtures.
"We can't achieve trust with only one side's efforts. Isn't there a saying that 'We need both hands to make a clapping sound?'" she said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/skoreas-leader-faces-nkorea-nuke-crisis-050243531.html
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Steve Dale Green, 41, of Bountiful, was arrested for investigation of having a sexual relationship with a teen who played on a soccer team he coached.
Davis County Jail
Enlarge photo?
FARMINGTON ? A 41-year-old Bountiful man has been charged with 14 first-degree felonies for alleged sexual encounters with a 13-year-old girl he coached in soccer.
Steve Dale Green is facing eight counts of rape, two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, two counts of forcible sodomy and charges of object rape of a child and rape of a child, from encounters that began in 2008 and continued through 2011, according to charges filed in 2nd District Court. The girl, now 17, met Green in 2007 when he was her soccer coach, a police affidavit states.
The team was for girls ages 12 to 15.
The teen-age girl said she became "close friends" with Green's family and went to their home often, the affidavit states. In 2008, when she was 13, the girl told police that Green initiated a sexual relationship.
Investigators said the relationship progressed from touching to intercourse and lasted until 2011. The sexual activity occurred at Green's Bountiful home on a near-daily basis, according to the affidavit.
Police said the encounters ended when the girl grew older and developed an interest in boys her own age. She confided in a relative about the encounters with her coach and? the relative contacted police.
"The defendant occupied a position of special trust in relation to the aforementioned minor female, therefore she could not consent to the sexual conduct that occurred when she was between 14 and 15 years old," the charges state.
A court date in the case has not been set.
E-mail: emorgan@desnews.com
Twitter: DNewsCrimeTeam
Source: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865573999/Bountiful-soccer-coach-facing-sex-abuse-charges.html
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Source: http://theleafchronicle.com/article/20130222/STEWART01/302220041/1014/RSS05
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By Jim Finkle
(Reuters) - Cybersecurity company Mandiant Corp won plaudits from its peers and made front-page news around the world this week when it published a report that purportedly traced a series of cyberattacks on U.S. companies to a Shanghai-based unit of the Chinese army.
But some hackers have turned the tables on the cyber-expert by creating malicious versions of its 74-page report that were infected with computer viruses. They emailed the tainted reports to their victims this week in a bid to wreak havoc under Mandiant's name.
Though the episode was embarrassing, the company said its systems were not breached. "Mandiant has not been compromised," the company said on its corporate blog.
Mandiant was founded in 2004 by Kevin Mandia, a former U.S. Air Force cyber-forensics investigator who co-authored an influential textbook on the subject. The company made its name by automating processes used to investigate computer breaches.
Mandiant was largely unknown outside the computer security industry until Monday, when it fingered the People's Liberation Army's Shanghai-based Unit 61398 as the most likely driving force behind a Chinese hacking group known as APT1.
China's Defense Ministry issued a flat denial of the accusations and called them "unprofessional." But Mandiant won kudos for the unprecedented level of detail in its report, including the location of a building in Shanghai's Pudong financial hub from which Mandiant said the unit had stolen "hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations across a diverse set of industries beginning as early as 2006."
Other security companies that have published reports on cyberattacks have shied away from so clearly identifying their perpetrators.
"It was a wonderful report," said Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, who is now with the Chertoff Group. "Everybody is saying 'it's about time.'"
The report did not identify the victims of APT1 or Mandiant's customers, though the company says it has worked for about 40 percent of the Fortune 500.
When asked why he had decided to go public with this report, Mandia, 42, told Reuters, "There is mounting frustration in the private sector. Tolerance is shrinking. We also have a bunch of employees here who are ex-military who sense that frustration and said, 'Let's push this out.'"
The report comes ahead of next week's annual RSA Conference on security in San Francisco, where Mandiant will showcase its products to help companies identify security breaches.
IPO IN THE CARDS?
Mandiant says it begins investigations by installing software it has developed that searches for infections by looking for evidence hackers leave behind. It refers to those digital signatures as Indicators of Compromise, or IOCs.
The proprietary database of those indicators makes up a critical part of the "special sauce" that automates the investigation process and, Mandiant says, enables investigators to root out attackers faster than rivals.
The company has thousands of IOCs in its database, which it is constantly expanding.
"We tend not to take the small jobs. We take the big ones - the ones you would love to read about in the paper, but we keep them out of the paper," said Mandiant's chief security officer, Richard Bejtlich.
Some investors have speculated that Mandiant is preparing for an initial public offering in the next year or so. On Friday, it named Mel Wesley to the post of chief financial officer. Wesley was CFO of publicly held OPNET, which was sold to Riverbed Technology in December for about $1 billion.
Mandia, who raised $70 million by selling stock to Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and One Equity Partners, the private investment arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co, said he is in no rush to go public. "I do not believe we need more capital," he said.
Ted Schlein, a partner with Kleiner Perkins, declined to say if an IPO was in the works, but told Reuters: "They are certainly of the size and they certainly have the operating metrics to be a public company."
Mandia said revenue soared 60 percent last year to about $100 million, and he expects it to climb at about the same clip this year on rising demand for Web-based services that help businesses identify when they have been attacked.
The New York Times and News Corp's Wall Street Journal recently disclosed that they hired Mandiant to investigate cyberattacks. The company has done similar work for Thomson Reuters Corp, parent of Reuters News, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. A spokesman for Thomson Reuters declined to confirm it.
PREMIUM FEES
Mandiant declined to discuss its fees, though analysts say they are among the highest in an industry where rivals include much bigger companies such as Accenture, AT&T Inc, Deloitte, PwC and Verizon Communications Inc, which offer cyber-forensics alongside other services.
Mandiant consultants often bill at rates of $450 or more an hour, said a person familiar with the company. Teams of consultants investigate breaches for weeks and sometimes several months, typically ringing up bills of between $250,000 and $1 million.
John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends for the SANS Institute, says Mandiant can charge a premium partly because it gets strong recommendations from the government and other customers.
There is often a waiting list for its services.
"It's supply and demand. You call Mandiant and Mandiant tells you when they can show up," said the person familiar with the company, who was not authorized to publicly discuss its finances.
Mandiant also competes against CrowdStrike and Cylance, which are run by the founders of a company known as Foundstone, a pioneer in cyber-forensics that had hired Mandia away from the military. He left Foundstone in 2004 to start Mandiant.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Deborah Charles in Washington; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Prudence Crowther)
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Video: Researchers develop protein 'passport' that help nanoparticles get past immune system
Friday, February 22, 2013The body's immune system exists to identify and destroy foreign objects, whether they are bacteria, viruses, flecks of dirt or splinters. Unfortunately, nanoparticles designed to deliver drugs, and implanted devices like pacemakers or artificial joints, are just as foreign and subject to the same response.
Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science and Penn's Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics have figured out a way to provide a "passport" for such therapeutic devices, enabling them to get past the body's security system.
The research was conducted by professor Dennis Discher, graduate students Pia Rodriguez, Takamasa Harada, David Christian and Richard K. Tsai and postdoctoral fellow Diego Pantano of the Molecular and Cell Biophysics Lab in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Penn.
It was published in the journal Science.
"From your body's perspective," Rodriguez said, "an arrowhead a thousand years ago and a pacemaker today are treated the same ? as a foreign invader.
"We'd really like things like pacemakers, sutures and drug-delivery vehicles to not cause an inflammatory response from the innate immune system."
The innate immune system attacks foreign bodies in a general way. Unlike the learned response of the adaptive immune system, which includes the targeted antibodies that are formed after a vaccination, the innate immune system tries to destroy everything it doesn't recognize as being part of the body.
This response has many cellular components, including macrophages ? literally "big eaters" ? that find, engulf and destroy invaders. Proteins in blood serum work in tandem with macrophages; they adhere to objects in the blood stream and draw macrophages' attention. If the macrophage determines these proteins are stuck to a foreign invader, they will eat it or signal other macrophages to form a barrier around it.
Drug-delivery nanoparticles naturally trigger this response, so researchers' earlier attempts to circumvent it involved coating the particles with polymer "brushes." These brushes stick out from the nanoparticle and attempt to physically block various blood serum proteins from sticking to its surface.
However, these brushes only slow down the macrophage-signaling proteins, so Discher and colleagues tried a different approach: Convincing the macrophages that the nanoparticles were part of the body and shouldn't be cleared.
In 2008, Discher's group showed that the human protein CD47, found on almost all mammalian cell membranes, binds to a macrophage receptor known as SIRPa in humans. Like a patrolling border guard inspecting a passport, if a macrophage's SIRPa binds to a cell's CD47, it tells the macrophage that the cell isn't an invader and should be allowed to proceed on.
Penn's Dennis Discher explains how his lab designed a protein that acts a "passport" for the body's immune system. Nanoparticles equipped with this passport last longer in the bloodstream than equivalent particles without it.Credit: Kurtis Sensenig, University of Pennsylvania
Since the publication of that study, other researchers determined the combined structure of CD47 and SIRPa together. Using this information, Discher's group was able to computationally design the smallest sequence of amino acids that would act like CD47. This "minimal peptide" would have to fold and fit well enough into the receptor of SIRPa to serve as a valid passport.
After chemically synthesizing this minimal peptide, Discher's team attached it to conventional nanoparticles that could be used in a variety of experiments.
"Now, anyone can make the peptide and put it on whatever they want," Rodriguez said
The research team's experiments used a mouse model to demonstrate better imaging of tumors and as well as improved efficacy of an anti-cancer drug-delivery particle.
As this minimal peptide might one day be attached to a wide range of drug-delivery vehicles, the researchers also attached antibodies of the type that could be used in targeting cancer cells or other kinds of diseased tissue. Beyond a proof of concept for therapeutics, these antibodies also served to attract the macrophages' attention and ensure the minimal peptide's passport was being checked and approved.
"We're showing that the peptide actually does inhibit the macrophage's response," Discher said. "We force the interaction and then overwhelm it."
The test of this minimal peptide's efficacy was in mice that were genetically modified so their macophages had SIRPa receptors similar to human. The researchers injected two kinds of nanoparticles ? ones carrying the peptide passport and ones without ? and then measured how fast the mice's immune system cleared them.
"We used different fluorescent dyes on the two kinds of nanoparticles, so we could take blood samples every 10 minutes and measure how many particles of each kind were left using flow cytometry," Rodriguez said. "We injected the two particles in a 1-to-1 ratio and 20-30 minutes later, there were up to four times as many particles with the peptide left."
Even giving therapeutic nanoparticles an additional half-hour before they are eaten by macrophages could be a major boon for treatments. Such nanoparticles might need to make a few trips through the macrophage-heavy spleen and liver to find their targets, but they shouldn't stay in the body indefinitely. Other combinations of exterior proteins might be appropriate for more permanent devices, such as pacemaker leads, enabling them to hide from the immune system for longer periods of time.
While more research is necessary before such applications become a reality, reducing the peptide down to a sequence of only a few amino acids was a critical step. The relative simplicity of this passport molecule to be more easily synthesized makes it a more attractive component for future therapeutics.
"It can be made cleanly in a machine," Discher said, "and easily modified during synthesis in order to attach to all sorts of implanted and injected things, with the goal of fooling the body into accepting these things as 'self.'"
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University of Pennsylvania: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews
Thanks to University of Pennsylvania for this article.
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