From foam fingers to hair nubs, MTV News rounds up Cyrus' new mainstream.
By Christina Garibaldi
By Richard Leong
NEW YORK (Reuters) - It sounds like the plot of a pulpy Hollywood thriller: a mad dash for more than $100 billion in cash in the 48 hours before the clock runs out.
Except in this case, the U.S. government is racing, and the money would come from normally staid, uneventful sales of short-dated Treasury bills.
While President Barack Obama said on Monday that lawmakers appear to have made progress on a deal to reopen the government and avert a looming debt default, it is unclear how willing investors will be to fork over money in exchange for Treasury bills until an agreement has been passed by both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The Treasury Department said it cannot guarantee the U.S. government will be able to pay its bills past October 17 if Congress does not raise the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling by then.
Concerns about a possible default caused investors to pull more money from short-term money market funds last week than at any time since the last debt ceiling crisis in August 2011. Overnight costs for loans secured with these bills have also risen, straining a key source of ongoing funding for banks.
The nervousness will likely result in the Treasury paying higher interest rates for this week's borrowing.
"If I were running some of these money market accounts, I would say ‘No way, Jose' - I am not going to bid in this auction because I could be buying a potential default," Dan Fuss, vice chairman and senior portfolio manager at Loomis Sayles, said in an interview on Monday.
The Treasury Department will sell $35 billion in three-month bills and $30 billion in six-month bills on Tuesday. It will auction $22 billion of one-year bills and a yet-to-be announced amount of one-month T-bills on Wednesday, which in recent weeks has ranged from $30-$35 billion.
As of last week, Wall Street firms and money market mutual funds had reduced their holdings of T-bills, or at least shunned buying more, if they matured in the remaining months of the year on fears the government might delay debt payments for the first time since the 1970s.
This has caused a spike in interest rates on T-bills that mature before the end of the year to levels not seen since the height of the global credit crunch nearly five years ago. Those yields are low - just 0.15 to 0.25 percent - but they are still double or triple the interest on those bills just a few weeks ago.
Large investors pulled $19.87 billion from money market funds that focus on Treasuries and government-related debt in the week ended October 9. This was the largest asset drop for institutional taxable government money funds since the week ended August 3, 2011, the Investment Company Institute said last week.
At the end of August, U.S. money market funds held almost $100 billion of T-bills that mature between mid-October to mid-November, accounting for about 17 percent of the holdings of Treasuries in money market funds, according to J.P. Morgan Securities.
Primary dealers, those Wall Street firms that do business directly with the Federal Reserve, have slashed their holdings of T-bills. In the week ended October 2, their net long positions in T-bills fell to $16.2 billion, less than half the amount two weeks earlier and the lowest level in about a year, data from the New York Federal Reserve showed.
"In our view, this clearly reflects concerns over the impasse on the debt ceiling," said Kam Poon, portfolio manager with Aberdeen Asset Management, in a research note.
Last week, interest rates on one-month bills ended at 0.26 percent after they briefly traded above 0.50 percent, higher than the yield on a two-year Treasury note.
"Many participants have already cut exposure to front end issues, which is likely to have a negative impact on auction proceedings," said Gennadiy Goldberg, interest rate strategist at TD Securities in New York.
So far, longer-dated bill rates have stayed put. The three-month, six-month, and one-year bill rates are trading between 0.07 percent and 0.13 percent, according to Reuters data.
A week ago, the Treasury Department sold $30 billion of one-month debt at an interest rate of 0.35 percent, the highest yield since October 2008. The total amount bid relative to the size of the sale came in at a ratio of 2.75 to 1, the lowest in about 4-1/2 years.
"We could see a similar progression this time, which could send fresh shudders through the market," said Goldberg.
The surge in one-month T-bill rates has increased other key short-term borrowing costs. In the $5 trillion repurchase agreement market, interest rates for banks and Wall Street firms to raise overnight cash jumped to 0.25 percent last week before retreating to 0.18 percent. A week earlier, overnight repo rates were at 0.09 percent.
Tempering some concerns, analysts said that even if rating agencies downgrade any T-bills and other Treasuries to "selective default" status due to delayed payments, money market funds are not required to sell them.
"There is no requirement to liquidate upon default, with the decision being left to the boards of directors of individual funds," Aberdeen's Poon said.
Without forced selling, money markets where banks and Wall Streets fund their day-to-day operations should keep operating without major disruptions, analysts said. Still, investors who buy these bills are going to demand more yield, no matter how small the increased risk.
(Reporting by Richard Leong; Additional reporting by Jennifer Ablan; Editing by Richard Chang)
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inspects the Natanz nuclear plant in central Iran on March 8, 2007. The tall cylinders are centrifuges for enriching uranium.
Tuesday in Geneva, negotiators from six nations will sit down to talks with Iran over that country's nuclear program. At the heart of the negotiations are Iran's centrifuges: machines that can be used to enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants, or for use in a bomb. This double role of centrifuges has negotiators in a bind.
"What the centrifuge basically is, is a long thin cylinder," says Jay Laughlin, head of operations at URENCO, a company with a huge uranium enrichment plant in New Mexico. A centrifuge spins at extremely high speeds, causing one kind of uranium, known as uranium-235, to concentrate at one end. This concentrated, or enriched, uranium is fed into another centrifuge, which concentrates it a little more, and so on.
The New Mexico plant looks like a giant Ikea box store, filled with centrifuges. "I can't tell you the exact number of centrifuges," Laughlin says. The precise number is classified. "I'll tell you it's in the thousands — or, tens of thousands would be probably a closer estimate."
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveils a sample of the third generation centrifuge during a ceremony to mark the National Nuclear Day in Tehran on March 9, 2010.
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveils a sample of the third generation centrifuge during a ceremony to mark the National Nuclear Day in Tehran on March 9, 2010.
As the concentration of uranium-235 goes up, it starts to become useful. At around 5 percent, the uranium will give you a nice, steady nuclear burn — perfect for a power plant. At 20 percent it can be used inside special reactors relied on for some types of research. At 90 percent uranium-235, the fuel will ignite in a flash — it's a bomb.
The URENCO plant is perfectly legal. Regulators watch it carefully to make sure the fuel it creates never goes above that 5 percent mark.
But Iran is a different story. Iran started its centrifuge program in the 1980s using designs bought off the black market. For many years, the endeavor was completely secret.
"It looked like it was set up as a military program," says David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank that tracks covert nuclear programs. Iran's program quietly designed and developed its centrifuges until 2002, when the international community discovered that Iran was building a big centrifuge plant.
But here's where the story takes a twist. Iran didn't try to cover up what it had done.
"Iran did something very clever," Albright says. "I mean it knew it was caught, and so it decided to get ahead of [the bad publicity] a little bit."
Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an international agreement that allows nations to develop nuclear technology as long as they don't build a bomb. So the nation's leaders did a big mea-culpa. They admitted they had developed their program in secret, but denied ever intending it as a weapons program.
"They've taken a hard line," Albright says. "They deny they ever thought about building nuclear weapons ... ever."
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency began visiting Iran's enrichment facilities regularly in the early 2000s. They counted centrifuges, took samples of uranium to make sure it wasn't being enriched beyond 5 percent, and tried their best to ensure that the program stayed peaceful.
But at the diplomatic level, things were still tense. Intelligence sources knew that parts of the program remained hidden. For example, a second enrichment plant was exposed in 2009.
Despite the tensions, the day-to-day inspections remained relatively low key. Olli Heinonen of Harvard University, who studied radiochemistry and nuclear materials analysis, worked for years as an inspector in Iran. He says that the people running the program day-to-day were friendly enough:
"They are just like any other person,' he says. "They are very often young, enthusiastic engineers. They just want to do a good job."
But their job, says David Albright, was to vastly expand Iran's enrichment capability without technically breaking the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And they've done it well. "In the last 10 years, Iran has developed its centrifuge program greatly," he says.
Today Iran has tens of thousands of centrifuges. They've enriched lots of uranium to the legal limit of 5 percent. But here's the trick: If it decides to, Iran could, with very little effort, feed that uranium back through the centrifuges and enrich it to a concentration level of 90 percent.
In just four to six weeks, Albright says, Iran "could have enough weapon-grade uranium for a nuclear weapon." Others say it would take longer, but most agree that Iran is within months or a year of getting the material it needs for a bomb.
Of course, the engineers Heinonen met would deny that this was a goal of their program. "But I don't think the guy on the facility floor knows the true intention of the program," Heinonen says. "Maybe very few people in the country know."
This is the challenge facing negotiators: You can inspect facilities and watch centrifuges spin. But you can't know the minds of the people who run them.
Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Zack Greinke stretches during practice in preparation for Friday's Game 1 of the National League baseball championship series, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, in Los Angeles. The Dodgers will face the winner of the division series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Zack Greinke stretches during practice in preparation for Friday's Game 1 of the National League baseball championship series, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, in Los Angeles. The Dodgers will face the winner of the division series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Clayton Kershaw runs on the field during practice in preparation for Friday's Game 1 of the National League baseball championship series on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, in Los Angeles. The Dodgers are to face the winner of Game 5 between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Los Angeles Dodgers' Andre Ethier chooses a bat during practice in preparation for Friday's Game 1 of the National League baseball championship series on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, in Los Angeles. The Dodgers are to face the winner of Game 5 between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
From left to right, Los Angeles Dodgers' Juan Uribe, Carl Crawford and Kenley Jansen talk during practice in preparation for Friday's Game 1 of the National League baseball championship series on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, in Los Angeles. The Dodgers are to face the winner of Game 5 between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Los Angeles Dodgers' Juan Uribe, right, jokingly bunts off of starting pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu, of South Korea, in the dugout during practice in preparation for Friday's Game 1 of the National League baseball championship series, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, in Los Angeles. The Dodgers will face the winner of the division series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — After two days of waiting, the Los Angeles Dodgers found out they will play St. Louis in the National League championship series.
The Dodgers worked out Wednesday just as the decisive Game 5 between Pittsburgh and St. Louis began. The team went through hitting sets with the game shown on the stadium's video boards, although there was no noticeable reaction as it progressed.
With the Cardinals winning 6-1, the Dodgers boarded buses to the airport for a flight to St. Louis.
"They're not going down easy," manager Don Mattingly said before the Cardinals won. "We felt like they were the best team in that division. They're a good mix of everything."
If the Pirates had won, the Dodgers would have unpacked their suitcases to stay home for the start of the series Friday.
Beating the Atlanta Braves to wrap up their division series in four games Monday night gave the Dodgers extra rest and time to reset their rotation. They took Tuesday off.
Zack Greinke will start Game 1 of the NLCS. Clayton Kershaw, who pitched on three days' rest Monday for the first time in his career, was set to go on regular rest in Game 2.
The team hopes the layoff will benefit rookie pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu, who struggled in Game 3 against Atlanta, giving up four runs and six hits over three innings.
"I felt he was a little nervous the other day," Mattingly said. "He did some things that he doesn't usually do."
Ryu has said he isn't injured, but the left-hander's performance wasn't as solid as what he showed during the regular season.
"He claims he felt fine and he continues to say he had no type of injury," general manager Ned Colletti said. "Everybody can have a bad start from time to time."
The Dodgers will announce a new 25-man roster for the NLCS. Mattingly said spots were still being discussed.
Andre Ethier was limited to pinch-hitting duty against the Braves, but if his left ankle has healed sufficiently, he could play the outfield. He did some hitting during the workout.
"I still have to sleep tonight to see if it responds tomorrow," Ethier said. "It feels good."
Hanley Ramirez got some rest for a bad back that has slowed him at shortstop, but not at the plate.
Mattingly goes into the next round not knowing if he will be managing the Dodgers next season. The club's new owners, including Mark Walter, Stan Kasten and Magic Johnson, didn't guarantee his option for 2014 last offseason.
"I don't want to speak about my contract," he said. "It's not the right time."
Colletti said he wasn't worried about Mattingly's status, adding, "That will all resolve itself."
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-10-09-BBN-Dodgers-Wait/id-8b2d77e35dc3426bae64325193526facBy C. E. Huggins
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who use antidepressants may be at higher than average risk of getting type 2 diabetes, according to a new look at past studies. But exactly how the two are linked isn't clear.
Some antidepressants may be of greater concern than others. And some factors - such as higher doses and longer durations of use - seem to raise diabetes risks as well, a team of UK researchers reported.
But conflicting data point to a need for more research.
"A definitive association cannot be drawn," lead researcher Katharine Barnard, of the University of Southampton in the UK, told Reuters Health.
"There is clearly a link between antidepressant medication and type 2 diabetes," she wrote in an email. But so far, studies can't say whether the drugs actually cause diabetes.
"The results… are all over the place - study to study and drug to drug," Dr. Peter D. Kramer said. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a spokesperson for the American Psychiatric Association.
"This study says yes, there's some reason to worry," said Kramer, who did not participate in the new research. "This is something to watch for and think about."
The number of antidepressant prescriptions written in the UK increased from 20.1 million in 1999 to 46.7 million in 2011, the researchers noted.
In light of that trend and studies showing the drugs may affect blood sugar, Barnard and her colleagues collected 25 years' worth of research to see whether there is a link between antidepressant use and diabetes risk.
They found one study that looked at 17 individual reports of blood sugar changes tied to the use of antidepressants.
Those included people with normal blood sugar levels who developed high blood sugar anywhere from three weeks to five months after starting antidepressants. Blood sugar levels returned to normal after people stopped taking the drugs.
The researchers also found 21 larger studies that ranged in size from 1,000 to more than 200,000 participants and yielded conflicting results.
For example, in one study of about 166,000 people with depression, researchers looked at 2,200 who were later diagnosed with diabetes. They found people who had used moderate to high doses of antidepressants for over two years were 84 percent more likely to get diabetes than those who hadn't used antidepressants recently.
In other studies the link between antidepressant use and diabetes was much weaker, or small enough that it could have been due to chance, according to findings published in the journal Diabetes Care.
Three past reviews on the topic found risks may vary by type of antidepressant. But results analyzed in those studies weren't always consistent either.
It's possible that weight gain associated with certain antidepressants could explain a higher diabetes risk, the researchers said. However, some studies took participants' weight into account and still found a link between the drugs and diabetes.
The studies included in the review were of varying quality, the UK team noted. They also used different methods to measure depression and diabetes - either asking participants directly or reviewing pharmacy and medical records.
And none of the studies were done using the gold standard design for medical research, known as a randomized controlled trial.
In that type of study, people would be randomly assigned to take antidepressants or not and followed to see who develops diabetes.
Kramer said the review suggests a need for caution.
"If you are on antidepressants, you should be checked for diabetes or glucose tolerance," he said. "And if you are gaining weight then discuss that with your doctor."
Marjorie Cypress, a nurse practitioner and spokesperson for the American Diabetes Association, stressed how important it is that people on antidepressants keep taking their medications.
"Some of these drugs can have some very bad side effects if you stop taking them suddenly," she told Reuters Health.
"If you have concerns, always talk to your healthcare provider," she said. She also noted that "keeping your weight down and exercising are probably the best things you can do to prevent (type 2) diabetes."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1b1Jm86 Diabetes Care, October 2013.
IRVING, Texas (AP) ? Federal investigators are working to find what caused a charter bus crash loaded with elderly casino-goers near Dallas, killing two and injuring 41.
Among those killed was the organizer of the trip to an Oklahoma casino.
Witnesses say the Cardinal Coach Line bus with 45 people was heading north on the President George Bush Turnpike in Irving when it veered suddenly across the highway, struck two concrete barriers and toppled onto the center median.
The Texas Department of Public Safety identified the dead as 69-year-old Paula Hahn, of Fort Worth, and 81-year-old Sue Taylor, of Hurst, a Fort Worth suburb.
Family members say Taylor, known to passengers as "Casino Sue," had organized such trips for about 10 years.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/federal-officials-probe-cause-fatal-bus-crash-072206945.html
A California sea lion who bobs her head in time with music has given scientists the first empirical evidence of an animal that is not capable of vocal mimicry but can keep the beat, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
The study's authors suggest that their findings challenge current scientific theories that an animal's ability to synchronize its movements with sound are associated with the same brain mechanisms that allow for vocal mimicry in humans and some birds such as cockatoos, parrots, and budgerigars. The findings were published online April 1 in APA's Journal of Comparative Psychology.
"Understanding the cognitive capabilities of animals requires carefully controlled, well-designed experiments," said study co-author Colleen Reichmuth, PhD, with the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "This study is particularly rigorous because it examines, step-by-step, the learning conditions that supported the emergence of this complex behavior."
Ronan, a 3-year-old sea lion, demonstrated her ability to bob to the beat in six experiments led by doctoral candidate Peter Cook at the Long Marine Lab at UCSC.
"Dancing is universal among humans, and until recently, it was thought to be unique to humans as well," said Cook. "When some species of birds were found to have a similar capability for rhythmic movement, it was linked to their ability to mimic sound. Now we're seeing that even mammals with limited vocal ability can move in time with a beat over a broad range of sounds and tempos."
Ronan's first musical "dance" lesson was to the tune of a simplified section of John Fogerty's "Down on the Corner," the study said. Once Ronan was trained to bob her head to music, the researchers tested her with two pop songs, "Everybody" by the Backstreet Boys, and "Boogie Wonderland" by Earth, Wind and Fire. Without any prior exposure to the songs, Ronan was able to bob to the beat of both songs over the course of multiple trials, according to the study. She then showed that she could follow along to five different tempos of "Boogie Wonderland."
Ronan's bobbing skills markedly improved over the course of the trials and apparently endured, the study found. The researchers gave her a follow-up test a few weeks after the final session and she was successful in keeping the beat with each of the sounds previously used, maintaining a minimum of 60 consecutive bobs to each of the various beats.
At the beginning of the experiments, Ronan was first trained to move in time to a hand signal, which was replaced by a simple non-musical sound signal. When she successfully completed tests by bobbing her head to various rhythmic sounds, she was rewarded with a fish, the study said.
The researchers varied the types and speed of the sounds to verify that she was actually following the rhythm by bobbing her head. To rule out that she wasn't simply bobbing her head in response to the previous beat, they tested her using two computer-generated, metronome-like ticks ? one that did not miss a beat and the other that did. Ronan kept the beat going even when the metronome missed a beat, according to the study.
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"A California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus) Can Keep the Beat: Motor Entrainment to Rhythmic Auditory Stimuli in a Non Vocal Mimic," online April 1, 2013, Journal of Comparative Psychology; Peter Cook, PhB, Andrew Rouse, BSc, Margaret Wilson, PhD and Colleen Reichmuth, PhD, Long Marine Laboratory, University of California Santa Cruz.
American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org
Thanks to American Psychological Association for this article.
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