'She literally murdered it,' Ciara tells MTV News of her and Nicki Minaj's next collaboration.
By Rob Markman
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1706366/nicki-minaj-ciara-im-out-single.jhtml
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Speaking in his annual town-hall meeting, which this year ran nearly five hours, the Russian president called for greater US-Russian cooperation on terrorism after the Boston bombing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen on television screens in a shop as he speaks during an annual call-in show on Russian television, 'Conversation With Vladimir Putin,' in Moscow on Thursday. Mr. Putin held forth on topics ranging from Russian-US cooperation on terrorism to whether he was happy.
Mikhail Metzel/AP
EnlargeThe Boston Marathon bombing offers a fresh opportunity for the US and Russia to revisit the basics in their struggling relationship and prioritize security cooperation in order to prevent any repetition of the tragedy, Vladimir Putin said in his annual electronic town-hall meeting with the Russian public Thursday.
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"I just call for this tragedy to be an incentive for us to become closer in tackling common threats, with terrorism being one of the most important and dangerous of them. If indeed we combine our efforts, we won?t take such hits and sustain such losses," Mr. Putin said.
In the wake of the bombing it became known that one of the two suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been on the radar of both the FBI and the Russian FSB security service, and that the Russian agency had warned both the FBI and the CIA about him in 2011. Yet a subsequent FBI check failed to validate the Russians' suspicions, and the FSB itself apparently did not follow up on Tamerlan when he made a six-month visit to the Russian republics of Dagestan and Chechnya the following year.
"We always have said that we shouldn't limit ourselves to declarations about terrorism being a common threat, and [that we should] engage in closer cooperation. Now these two criminals have proven the correctness of our thesis," Putin added.
Putin's yearly telethon, which took place even during the years Dmitry Medvedev was president and Putin was prime minister, is seldom a news-breaking event. But it is a good opportunity to take the Kremlin's temperature on, literally, scores of issues. Experts argue over how tightly stage-managed the sessions are ? they combine a studio audience, telelinks with viewers across the country, and questions submitted by electronic media ? but there is no doubt about the ability of the Russian leader to field an exhausting battery of questions, on almost every imaginable subject, and provide lengthy, detailed answers. The event has grown steadily in duration, from 2 hours, 27 minutes for the first one in 2001, to 4 hours, 33 minutes last year.
Today he talked for a whopping 4 hours, 47 minutes, and answered almost 100 queries, including: How goes the fight against corruption? When will Russia's new stealth fighter be ready for service? Will he sack the government of Prime Minister Medvedev over alarming signs that the Russian economy is slipping into recession? Does he think that the current crackdown on NGOs, and upcoming prosecution of protesters connected with an alleged "riot" at a protest rally last May, suggest "overtones of Stalinism" in current Russian politics? Is he happy?
On the issue that will be of greatest interest in the US, Putin combined his plea for greater security cooperation with some tough criticism of past US policies and attitudes.
"This [slump in Russia-US relations] didn't begin yesterday," he said. "Back when our American colleagues called upon us to join in the process [leading up to the 2003 invasion of] Iraq, we told them it was a mistake. Our position was open and honest, but relations grew cooler. After that there were the events in Libya, and other states. We are watching chaos unfold everywhere."
"Must we support what we consider erroneous? Why do they demand that we accept their standards? Let's not demand anything from each other, but rather look for ways to improve mutual understanding," he said.
He also argued that Western sympathy for the Chechen side in two brutal wars in the past 20 years ? a struggle that has morphed over that time from a secular nationalist bid for Chechen independence from Russia into a more diffuse, Cacausus-wide jihadist insurrection ? has been deeply misguided.
"I always felt indignation when our Western partners and Western media referred to terrorists who conducted brutal and bloody crimes on Russian soil as 'rebels,'" Putin said.
On corruption, Putin vowed ? as he has in most telethons since 2001 ? to crush it: "We will fight against [corruption] no less stubbornly than against inflation. We will wipe it out," he said.
Russia's cool new T-50 "fifth generation" fighter plane, which is claimed to be equivalent to the US F-22 Raptor, will enter service as promised in 2016, Putin said.
Despite persistent rumors that Putin may be preparing to sack Medvedev's government, and perhaps even call fresh Duma elections, Putin insisted "there is no division between the government and the president," on the economy. He added Medvedev's government has been in place for less than a year, and needs time to work.
Putin dismissed the question about echoes of Stalinism, saying "Stalinism is connected to the cult of personality, massive legal abuses, repressions, and gulags. There are no such things in Russia, and I hope they will never happen again."
He insisted that in contemporary Russia, people are jailed "for legal violations" and not for their political views.
Many critics argue that laws are selectively applied, and bent, in Russia in order to punish political opponents such as former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Pussy Riot performance-art band, currently on-trial protest leader Alexei Navalny, and almost 30 people soon to be tried, and facing serious jail time, over a fairly minor disturbance at a legal protest rally almost a year ago.
As for whether Putin is happy, he suggested the jury is still out on that.
"I am thankful to destiny and the citizens of Russia for showing the trust that allowed me to become Russian president," he said. "This is my whole life. Whether it's enough for happiness, that's another question."
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Each month, Trulia's Housing Barometer charts how quickly the housing market is moving back to "normal." We summarize three key housing market indicators: construction starts (Census), existing home sales (NAR), and the delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate (LPS First Look). For each indicator, we compare this month's data to (1) how bad the numbers got at their worst and (2) their pre-bubble "normal" levels. In March 2013, construction starts and the delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate improved:Construction starts rocketed to a new post-bubble high. Housing starts were at a 1,036,000 seasonally adjusted annualized rate -- up 7 percent month-over-month and 47 percent year-over-year -- which is the highest level since June 2008. In March, 38 percent of new starts were in multi-unit buildings, compared with the typical level of 20 percent Construction starts are now 55 percent of the way back to the normal level of 1.5 million from their low during the bust.
Existing home sales went down a bit. Sales fell 0.6 percent in March to a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 4.92 million homes. That's a 10 percent increase over one year ago. Excluding distressed sales, conventional home sales were up 23 percent year-over-year in March. Also, inventory rose even on a seasonally adjusted basis for the second month in a row. Overall, existing home sales are 66 percent back to normal.
The delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate dropped yet again. The share of mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure dropped to 9.96 percent in March, down from 10.18 percent in February and 10.98 percent in March 2012. The combined delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate is 48 percent back to normal and at its lowest level since October 2008.
Averaging these three back-to-normal percentages together, the housing market is now 56 percent of the way back to normal, up from 54 percent in February and 43 percent six months ago in September. One year ago, the market was only 33 percent back to normal -- so the last year has been a significant recovery. Furthermore, this month's improvement is even better than it looks with the shift of sales from distressed to conventional and early signs that the inventory crunch may be easing, which will bring some relief to would-be homebuyers.
Jed Kolko is the chief economist for online listings site Trulia. This article originally appeared on the Trulia Trends blog.
See more by Jed Kolko:
Learn From Their Mistakes: What Homeowners, Renters Regret
Are Homes Near Baseball Stadiums Worth More?
Baseball Season 2013: Are Homes Near Stadiums Worth More?
More on AOL Real Estate:
Find out how to calculate mortgage payments.
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Find foreclosures in your area.
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Follow us on Twitter at @AOLRealEstate or connect with AOL Real Estate on Facebook.
Source: http://realestate.aol.com/blog/on/housing-recovery-march-2013/
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NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope has snapped stunning new photos of Comet ISON, which could become one of the brightest comets ever seen when it zips through the inner solar system this fall.
Hubble captured the new photos on April 10, when?Comet ISON?was slightly closer than Jupiter. At the time the icy wanderer was about 386 million miles?(621 million kilometers) from the sun and 394 million miles (634 million km) from Earth.
The new images are already helping astronomers take a bead on the mysterious Comet ISON, which may shine as brightly as the full moon when it makes its closest pass by the sun in late November. (The comet poses no threat to Earth, NASA has said.) [Photos of Comet ISON in Night Sky]
For example, the Hubble telescope photos show that ISON is already becoming quite active, though it's still pretty far from our star. The?comet's dusty head, or coma, is about 3,100 miles (5,000 km) wide, and its tail is more than 57,000 miles (92,000 km) long, astronomers said. And ISON sports a dust-blasting jet that extends at least 2,300 miles (3,700 km).
Yet the comet's nucleus is surprisingly small ? no more than 3 or 4 miles (4.8 to 6.5 km) across.
This small core makes the comet's behavior on its trip around the sun, which will bring ISON within 730,000 miles (nearly 1.2 million km) of the solar surface on Nov. 28, especially tough to predict, researchers said. Also complicating the forecast is the fact that ISON is apparently making its first trip through the inner solar system from the distant, icy Oort cloud.
So it's difficult to know if ISON will live up to its billing or fizzle out like Comet Kahoutek ? another possible "comet of the century" ? did in 1973.
But Comet ISON's relatively pristine state has a real upside to astronomers, who will study the material that sublimates off the comet to gain insight into its composition.
"As a first-time visitor to the inner solar system, Comet C/ISON provides astronomers a rare opportunity to study a fresh comet preserved since the formation of the solar system," Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., who led a team that imaged the comet, said in a statement. "The expected high brightness of the comet as it nears the sun allows for many important measurements that are impossible for most other fresh comets."
NASA has organized a?Comet ISON Observing Campaign?to coordinate the efforts of observatories on the ground and in space. Hubble is seen as a key player in this campaign, along with a number of other instruments.
Comet ISON is officially designated as C/2012 S1 (ISON) and was discovered in September 2012 by Russian amateur astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok.
Hubble's new ISON photos were taken just two weeks before the telescope's 23rd anniversary. The Hubble Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall?and?Google+.?Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?or?Google+. Originally published on?SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hubble-telescope-photographs-potential-comet-century-192609966.html
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By Bob Sullivan, Columnist, NBC News
A stock market and a nation already on edge was temporarily knocked off its axis on Tuesday by a single fake tweet.?
Following a hack attack, the Associated Press' verified Twitter account posted "an erroneous tweet" claiming that two explosions occurred in the White House and that President Barack Obama is injured. Moments later, the @AP Twitter account ? with nearly 2 million followers ? was suspended.
"That's a bogus tweet," an AP spokesperson initially told NBC News, a statement that was?repeated by the company's corporate communications account. Though the false tweet disappeared, the false message continued to exist on the service in over 4,000 retweets.
The chart of the Dow Jones industrial average just after 1 p.m. may as well have been a chart of America's heartbeat -- stopped for a moment, again, by seemingly horrific information. The Dow lost more than 140 points almost instantly, before recovering five minutes later.
It's incredible what a single 12-word lie can do.
The markets plummet, and then snap back after a fake AP terror tweet, with the "Power Lunch" crew.
"We're in an environment where we're sensitive to any news that sounds like terrorism," said Art Hogan of Lazard Capital Markets.? "That makes it that much more believable. That's the tricky part. When something like AP gets hacked, it becomes reality for a period of time, until it's not."
The market's reaction hints at the our collective fragility right now.? In the past, carefully crafted fake press releases or other Internet disinformation has been able to influence individual stocks both up or down.
But a single Tweet sinking the market?? It's just the latest sign that lies now spread on the Internet as fast as computer viruses, and can have just as much impact. Like the false rumors that spread like wildfire during the Boston bombing aftermath, or Hurricane Sandy before that, Twitter's surge to mainstream popularity ? it now boasts 140 million U.S. accounts???has made it an incredible source of on-the-spot information, but also the world's most powerful rumor-mongering tool.
"You wonder who did it and whether it was done on purpose. It certainly was an instant implosion," said Art Cashin, director of floor operations for UBS Financial Services, who watched the minutes of bedlam on the floor of the NYSE. Cashin said the reaction was especially dramatic because it said the president was injured.
If you define the term "hacking" loosely, you might consider that whoever wrote the fake tweet hacked not only AP's account, but the entire Wall Street trading system. The trades which sank the market Tuesday were almost certainly initiated by automated trading programs designed to profit by fast-twitch reacting to good or bad news.
The combination of a jittery public, automated trading, and a worldwide rumor tool was toxic for the markets.
"That goes to show you how algorithms read headlines and create these automatic orders ? you don't even have time to react as a human being," said Kenny Polcari of O'Neil Securities. "I'd imagine the (Security and Exchange Commission) is going to look into how this happened. It's not about banning computers, but it's about protection and securing our markets."
It's also about figuring out how to handle a world where the firewall between seemingly disconnected systems like Twitter and brokerage servers is really only 91 characters long, particularly a world where skepticism?s classic grains of salt seem to be in short supply.
CNBC's JeeYeon Park, Patti Domm and John Melloy contributed to this story.
Related:?AP Twitter account hacked, posts false White House scare
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The ASUS CUBE with Google TV is the latest premium Google TV box to come out, and it’s also one of the most anticipated. It has a unique look and design, a nifty rotating-cube user interface, and plenty of features both in the hardware and software. We’ve been waiting for it since it was first unveiled in January at CES, and now it’s here.
I’m convinced that the Google TV platform is “almost there”, and one key component to get it from a cool toy for enthusiasts to something you would find in a mainstream consumer’s living room is great hardware. The $140 price tag will help -- you can grab one from various e-tailers including Newegg -- will help provided the unit provides a good experience with the current Google TV software.
The ASUS CUBE is certainly unique, but is it great? Hit the break and we’ll have a look.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/JcnpV-aKzkI/story01.htm
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Apr. 22, 2013 ? In a serendipitous discovery, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to turn bone marrow stem cells directly into brain cells.
Current techniques for turning patients' marrow cells into cells of some other desired type are relatively cumbersome, risky and effectively confined to the lab dish. The new finding points to the possibility of simpler and safer techniques. Cell therapies derived from patients' own cells are widely expected to be useful in treating spinal cord injuries, strokes and other conditions throughout the body, with little or no risk of immune rejection.
"These results highlight the potential of antibodies as versatile manipulators of cellular functions," said Richard A. Lerner, the Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Immunochemistry and institute professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at TSRI, and principal investigator for the new study. "This is a far cry from the way antibodies used to be thought of -- as molecules that were selected simply for binding and not function."
The researchers discovered the method, reported in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 22, 2013, while looking for lab-grown antibodies that can activate a growth-stimulating receptor on marrow cells. One antibody turned out to activate the receptor in a way that induces marrow stem cells -- which normally develop into white blood cells -- to become neural progenitor cells, a type of almost-mature brain cell.
Nature's Toolkit
Natural antibodies are large, Y-shaped proteins produced by immune cells. Collectively, they are diverse enough to recognize about 100 billion distinct shapes on viruses, bacteria and other targets. Since the 1980s, molecular biologists have known how to produce antibodies in cell cultures in the laboratory. That has allowed them to start using this vast, target-gripping toolkit to make scientific probes, as well as diagnostics and therapies for cancer, arthritis, transplant rejection, viral infections and other diseases.
In the late 1980s, Lerner and his TSRI colleagues helped invent the first techniques for generating large "libraries" of distinct antibodies and swiftly determining which of these could bind to a desired target. The anti-inflammatory antibody Humira?, now one of the world's top-selling drugs, was discovered with the benefit of this technology.
Last year, in a study spearheaded by TSRI Research Associate Hongkai Zhang, Lerner's laboratory devised a new antibody-discovery technique -- in which antibodies are produced in mammalian cells along with receptors or other target molecules of interest. The technique enables researchers to determine rapidly not just which antibodies in a library bind to a given receptor, for example, but also which ones activate the receptor and thereby alter cell function.
Lab Dish in a Cell
For the new study, Lerner laboratory Research Associate Jia Xie and colleagues modified the new technique so that antibody proteins produced in a given cell are physically anchored to the cell's outer membrane, near its target receptors. "Confining an antibody's activity to the cell in which it is produced effectively allows us to use larger antibody libraries and to screen these antibodies more quickly for a specific activity," said Xie. With the improved technique, scientists can sift through a library of tens of millions of antibodies in a few days.
In an early test, Xie used the new method to screen for antibodies that could activate the GCSF receptor, a growth-factor receptor found on bone marrow cells and other cell types. GCSF-mimicking drugs were among the first biotech bestsellers because of their ability to stimulate white blood cell growth -- which counteracts the marrow-suppressing side effect of cancer chemotherapy.
The team soon isolated one antibody type or "clone" that could activate the GCSF receptor and stimulate growth in test cells. The researchers then tested an unanchored, soluble version of this antibody on cultures of bone marrow stem cells from human volunteers. Whereas the GCSF protein, as expected, stimulated such stem cells to proliferate and start maturing towards adult white blood cells, the GCSF-mimicking antibody had a markedly different effect.
"The cells proliferated, but also started becoming long and thin and attaching to the bottom of the dish," remembered Xie.
To Lerner, the cells were reminiscent of neural progenitor cells -- which further tests for neural cell markers confirmed they were.
A New Direction
Changing cells of marrow lineage into cells of neural lineage -- a direct identity switch termed "transdifferentiation" -- just by activating a single receptor is a noteworthy achievement. Scientists do have methods for turning marrow stem cells into other adult cell types, but these methods typically require a radical and risky deprogramming of marrow cells to an embryonic-like stem-cell state, followed by a complex series of molecular nudges toward a given adult cell fate. Relatively few laboratories have reported direct transdifferentiation techniques.
"As far as I know, no one has ever achieved transdifferentiation by using a single protein -- a protein that potentially could be used as a therapeutic," said Lerner.
Current cell-therapy methods typically assume that a patient's cells will be harvested, then reprogrammed and multiplied in a lab dish before being re-introduced into the patient. In principle, according to Lerner, an antibody such as the one they have discovered could be injected directly into the bloodstream of a sick patient. From the bloodstream it would find its way to the marrow, and, for example, convert some marrow stem cells into neural progenitor cells. "Those neural progenitors would infiltrate the brain, find areas of damage and help repair them," he said.
While the researchers still aren't sure why the new antibody has such an odd effect on the GCSF receptor, they suspect it binds the receptor for longer than the natural GCSF protein can achieve, and this lengthier interaction alters the receptor's signaling pattern. Drug-development researchers are increasingly recognizing that subtle differences in the way a cell-surface receptor is bound and activated can result in very different biological effects. That adds complexity to their task, but in principle expands the scope of what they can achieve. "If you can use the same receptor in different ways, then the potential of the genome is bigger," said Lerner.
In addition to Lerner and Xie, contributors to the study, "Autocrine Signaling Based Selection of Combinatorial Antibodies That Transdifferentiate Human Stem Cells," were Hongkai Zhang of the Lerner Laboratory, and Kyungmoo Yea of The Scripps Korea Antibody Institute, Chuncheon-si, Korea.
Funding for the study was provided by The Scripps Korea Antibody Institute and Hongye Innovative Antibody Technologies (HIAT).
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/4sCqbLxIxUg/130422154756.htm
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In SEO circles, content marketing is the rage for 2013, but it's a concept that not all our clients and prospects are understanding just yet.
So, let me put it in the simplest terms, using one specific example of a resource for content marketing: Slideshare.
In addition to making sure that your website content matches the types of searches people are doing to find you, it's also important to promote your content more widely across the Internet. Remember the old days, when we all had a business card? That business card didn't do us much good unless we distributed it, by passing it out at trade shows, during visits with clients and prospects, and by advertising our contact information in print ads.
Well, your website is now your business card, although Google has certainly made it much easier to find you. Now the key is to make sure your "business card" doesn't end up at the bottom of the stack, where no one will look for you. Creating content you can seed on third-party sites and link back to your website is one way to help move your "business card" up in the deck.
The more links you have from other websites, the more credible your company will be viewed by the search engines, and the higher your site will rank.
There are a number of ways you can create content for these third-party sites, but let's just focus on one today -- Slideshare.
Slideshare is like YouTube, except instead of sharing videos, you share Powerpoint presentations. For businesses, this is great, because it's very likely you have at least one sales or marketing person in your organization who has created a Powerpoint, so the technology isn't daunting.
There are just a few things you need to know while creating a Slideshare presentation to make it an effective piece of content for SEO purposes:
1. Include keywords that are important search terms for your audience so that your presentation can be ranked well by search engines;
2. Include links in the presentation to your website so that prospects can find your site and so the search engines can associate the content with your company;
3. Try to make it interesting to generate the most interest in your topic.
4. Once you've posted it, share it via your social media accounts, by e-mail and by embedding it on your website.
If you haven't jumped in the content marketing pool yet, start with Slideshare. It's not difficult and it'll help you get a feel for the SEO and promotional opportunities with third-party content sites.
Here's an example of a Slideshare we prepared for our client EDCO Awards, a manufacturer of corporate awards.
Need help with your SEO and website marketing? Contact Pilot Fish at 877-799-9994 ext. 2104 or fill out this form.
Source: http://kiss-seo-wd.blogspot.com/2013/04/slideshare-delivering-in-promotion-and.html
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Apr. 18, 2013 ? A new study with college roommates shows that a particular style of thinking that makes people vulnerable to depression can actually "rub off" on others, increasing their symptoms of depression six months later.
The research, from psychological scientists Gerald Haeffel and Jennifer Hames of the University of Notre Dame, is published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Studies show that people who respond negatively to stressful life events, interpreting the events as the result of factors they can't change and as a reflection of their own deficiency, are more vulnerable to depression. This "cognitive vulnerability" is such a potent risk factor for depression that it can be used to predict which individuals are likely to experience a depressive episode in the future, even if they've never had a depressive episode before.
Individual differences in this cognitive vulnerability seem to solidify in early adolescence and remain stable throughout adulthood, but Haeffel and Hames predicted that it might still be malleable under certain circumstances.
The researchers hypothesized that cognitive vulnerability might be "contagious" during major life transitions, when our social environments are in flux. They tested their hypothesis using data from 103 randomly assigned roommate pairs, all of whom had just started college as freshmen.
Within one month of arriving on campus, the roommates completed an online questionnaire that included measures of cognitive vulnerability and depressive symptoms. They completed the same measures again 3 months and 6 months later; they also completed a measure of stressful life events at the two time points.
The results revealed that freshmen who were randomly assigned to a roommate with high levels of cognitive vulnerability were likely to "catch" their roommate's cognitive style and develop higher levels of cognitive vulnerability; those assigned to roommates who had low initial levels of cognitive vulnerability experienced decreases in their own levels. The contagion effect was evident at both the 3-month and 6-month assessments.
Most importantly, changes in cognitive vulnerability affected risk for future depressive symptoms: Students who showed an increase in cognitive vulnerability in the first 3 months of college had nearly twice the level of depressive symptoms at 6 months than those who didn't show such an increase.
The findings provide striking evidence for the contagion effect, confirming the researchers' initial hypothesis.
Based on these findings, Haeffel and Hames suggest that the contagion effect might be harnessed to help treat symptoms of depression:
"Our findings suggest that it may be possible to use an individual's social environment as part of the intervention process, either as a supplement to existing cognitive interventions or possibly as a stand-alone intervention," they write. "Surrounding a person with others who exhibit an adaptive cognitive style should help to facilitate cognitive change in therapy."
According to the researchers, the results of this study indicate that it may be time to reconsider how we think about cognitive vulnerability.
"Our study demonstrates that cognitive vulnerability has the potential to wax and wane over time depending on the social context," say Haeffel and Hames. "This means that cognitive vulnerability should be thought of as plastic rather than immutable."
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/lBxtXHdmyR4/130418154413.htm
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The small squares superimposed on this image of the Milky Way galaxy show where in the sky the Kepler telescope is hunting for Earth-like planets. Kepler, which launched in 2009, has identified more than 100 planets.
NASAThe small squares superimposed on this image of the Milky Way galaxy show where in the sky the Kepler telescope is hunting for Earth-like planets. Kepler, which launched in 2009, has identified more than 100 planets.
NASAAstronomers have found three planets orbiting far-off stars that are close to Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone": a distance from their suns that makes the planets' surfaces neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.
One of the three planets orbits a star with the prosaic name Kepler-69.
"Kepler-69 is a sun-like star," says Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute who uses the Kepler space telescope, which is on a mission to search for Earth-like planets. It finds planets by looking for tiny dips in the light coming from a star. The dips come when a planet passes in front of a star. By measuring the interval between dips, astronomers can figure out how long it takes a planet to orbit its star.
? Back in the good old days, you'd find one or two crappy, Jupiter-like planets, and you'd be on the cover of 'Time' magazine. But those days are long gone.
The planet around Kepler-69 is "around 70 percent bigger than Earth, so what we call super-Earth-sized," says Barclay. "This represents the first super-Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a star like our sun."
Twenty five years ago, if you had asked astronomers if there were planets around other stars, they'd probably say maybe, but they'd admit they were just speculating.
Boy, have times changed. In the past two decades, using some innovative measurement techniques, astronomers have confirmed the existence of lots of planets ? 697, in fact ? according to the Exoplanet Orbit Database.
"Back in the good old days, you'd find one or two crappy, Jupiter-like planets, and you'd be on the cover of Time magazine. But those days are long gone," says Paul Butler, a planet hunter at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Most new planets barely elicit a yawn these days.
The Kepler mission is partly to blame for that. The spacecraft, which launched in 2009, has been wildly successful, having found more than 100 planets, most of which have been the nasty Jupiter-sized planets Butler talks about. But the three planets being announced today are different.
In addition to the one orbiting Kepler-69, there are two around Kepler-62 that are even closer to Earth-sized. Kepler-62 is a dimmer star than Kepler-69, so the planets' orbits must be closer to the star to keep them in the habitable zone. The planets around Kepler-62 are described in the online edition of the journal Science.
William Borucki, an astronomer with the NASA Ames Research Center and the principal investigator for Kepler, says the mission's goal is to find how many Earth twins are out there.
"If they're frequent, then there may be lots of life throughout the galaxy," says Borucki. "They may just be waiting for us to call and say, 'Hello, we'd like to join the club.' Or if we don't find any, the answer may be just the opposite. Maybe we're alone, there isn't anybody out there; there will never be a Star Trek because there's no place to go to."
And that's a sobering thought.
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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian investigators increased pressure on one of President Vladimir Putin's biggest critics on Thursday, opening a new criminal investigation against Alexei Navalny a day after he went on trial on theft charges.
Navalny, who has helped organize a wave of protests against Putin and is a campaigner against state corruption, denies any wrongdoing and says charges are being falsified against him as part of a Kremlin campaign to crush the opposition.
Russia's Investigative Committee, which answers directly to Putin, said Navalny and his brother Oleg were suspected of defrauding a company out of 3.8 million roubles ($120,000) by organizing mail transport for them at excessive prices in 2008.
It is the fourth criminal case opened against Navalny in recent months.
Navalny reacted wryly to the announcement of the new investigation on his Twitter feed as he traveled back to Moscow by train after going on trial on Wednesday on charges of theft in the city of Kirov.
"I woke up on the train. I found out that another criminal case has been launched. That means our trip was successful," he wrote.
The 36-year-old faces up to 10 years in jail in the trial that opened on Wednesday if he is convicted of stealing about $510,000 from a timber firm he was advising in Kirov in 2009. The trial has been adjourned until April 24.
The most prominent opposition leader to be tried in post-Soviet Russia, Navalny says he believes Putin, 60, ordered the investigations and trial against him to sideline him as a potential presidential rival.
The Kremlin denies putting pressure on the courts and says Putin does not use them for political ends. But Putin's former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin cast doubt on the trial this week, saying it may harm Russia's investment image.
POLITICAL JUSTICE
Navalny has been a thorn the government's side since starting an online campaign against state corruption in 2007.
A ruling party deputy was forced to resign in February when Navalny revealed on his blog that he had failed to declare $2 million worth of property in the U.S. state of Florida.
"It is obvious that all the cases against Navalny are politically motivated," veteran Russian rights activist, Svetlana Gannushkina, told Interfax.
Since Putin's return to the Kremlin last May after four years as prime minister, two members of the dissident punk band Pussy Riot have been jailed, a prominent protest leader has been thrown out of parliament and another is under house arrest.
In addition to the case that has put Navalny in the dock, he has been charged with embezzling up to $3.24 million from a political party in 2007.
Investigators said the latest case will be bundled together with another ongoing investigation into suspicions that Navalny, along with his brother, cheated a mail-transport company out of $1.79 million.
A spokesman for the Investigative Committee said last week that cases against Navalny had been speeded up because he had taunted the authorities.
More than a dozen protesters also face sentences of up to 10 years over clashes with police at a rally on the eve of Putin's inauguration last May, after which parliament pushed through stiff new penalties for demonstrators who stray out of line.
A group of human rights and opposition activists blamed riot police for initiating the clashes at the May 6 rally across the river from the Kremlin in a report published on Thursday.
The report, based on 600 witness interviews, case and video materials, accuses the authorities of exaggerating the scale of the violence and using excessive force.
About 600 protesters were detained at the rally, part of a campaign of protest against Putin's 13-year dominance of politics that at its peak saw 100,000 Russians on the streets but has since lost steam.
(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Pravin Char)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/russia-opens-investigation-against-protest-leader-navalny-064736129.html
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A driver that fled from a traffic stop in Foley ended Thursday night in Escambia County.
The Florida Highway Patrol said the 2001 Honda Accord driven by 44-year old Rodney Durand Reynolds of Foley was spotted by the Baldwin County Sheriff?s Office? at County Road 87 and Highway 98 in Alabama. Baldwin County deputies attempted to overtake the vehicle as it continued eastbound at a high rate of speed on Highway 98 into Florida.
Reynolds turned right onto Bauer Road before turning onto Seratine Drive and crashing into a wooded area about 10:24 p.m.. He was apprehended and detained on scene by the Baldwin County Sheriffs Office.
Reynolds was placed under arrest by the FHP for DUI and driving while license suspended. He was also cited for careless driving and no proof of insurance. Additional charges are pending in Baldwin County. A passenger in his vehicle 39-year old Cynthia Foster of Gadsden, Ala., was not injured.
Source: http://www.northescambia.com/2013/04/baldwin-county-chase-ends-with-florida-traffic-crash
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When you're offered a promotion at work it's hard not to get excited and just take it. However, sometimes it's not always a good fit, and creativity blog 99U suggests you think twice before you say yes to a promotion.
99U points to the satirical, but still useful Peter Principle, that says when people get promoted they often go beyond their means and can't actually do the job. The lesson is that if a promotion doesn't fit into your skill set, it's probably not worth it, even if the pay's a lot higher:
If the newly offered promotion involves much of the same skill set with a minimal addition of new skills, then it?s likely a good fit. If however, the new position would draw you away from your core strengths, then perhaps you should reconsider. Either way, it?s important to examine whether any new competencies are ones you feel capable of acquiring. If you feel like you?d be a quick learner, then it might be worth rolling the dice. If not, then perhaps you should pass and wait for a more fitting assignment to come along.
If you're in line for a promotion, it's worth thinking about whether it's something you'll really be good at. It's easy to just just accept a promotion right away because it gets you further along in the company, but if it's not a good fit it might end up getting you in more trouble than it's worth.
"The Peter Principle" and Other Reasons To Think Twice Before Accepting a New Promotion | 99U
Photo by Egan Snow.
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VATICAN CITY (AP) ? The Vatican said Monday that Pope Francis supports the Holy See's crackdown on the largest umbrella group of U.S. nuns, dimming hopes that a Jesuit pope whose emphasis on the poor mirrored the nuns' own social outreach would take a different approach than his predecessor.
The Vatican last year imposed an overhaul of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious after determining the sisters took positions that undermined Catholic teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality while promoting "radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith." Investigators praised the nuns' humanitarian work, but accused them of ignoring critical issues, including fighting abortion.
On Monday, the heads of the conference met with the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Gerhard Mueller, who is in charge of the crackdown. It was their first meeting since Mueller was appointed in July.
In a statement, Mueller's office said he told the sisters that he had discussed the matter recently with Francis and that the pope had "reaffirmed the findings of the assessment and the program of reform."
The conference, for its part, said the talks were "open and frank," and noted that Mueller had informed them of Francis' decision.
"We pray that these conversations may bear fruit for the good of the Church," the conference said on its website.
The Vatican crackdown unleashed a wave of popular support for the sisters, including parish vigils, protests outside the Vatican's embassy in Washington, D.C., and a U.S. Congressional resolution commending the sisters for their service to the country.
Following Francis' election, several sisters had expressed hope that a Jesuit pope devoted to the poor and stressing a message of mercy rather than condemnation would take a gentler approach than his predecessor, Benedict XVI.
Francis has called for a more "tender" church and one that serves society's poorest ? precisely a message American sisters have stressed in their ministry in hospitals, hospices, soup kitchens and schools that serve some of the most marginalized in the U.S.
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit author who has been a staunch supporter of the U.S. sisters, cautioned against reading too much into the Vatican statement.
He noted that Francis' first appointment to the Vatican bureaucracy was that of the Rev. Jose Rodriguez Carballo as the No. 2 in the Vatican's congregation for religious orders. Rodriguez Carballo had been superior of the Friars Minor branch of the Franciscan order that was founded by the pope's namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, who devoted himself to helping the poor.
Martin said it would have been unusual for Francis to undo a process that has been years in the works and that as a Jesuit he is "naturally going to be sympathetic" to the challenges faced by members of religious orders, such as those represented by the nuns' conference.
As part of its imposed reforms, the Vatican appointed Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain and two other bishops to oversee a rewriting of the conference's statutes, to review its plans and programs, approve speakers and ensure the group properly follows Catholic prayer and ritual.
The conference represents about 57,000 sisters, or 80 percent of U.S. nuns. It has argued that the Vatican reached "flawed" conclusions based on "unsubstantiated accusations." The group's officers have said they would participate in discussions with Sartain "as long as possible" but vowed they would not compromise their group's mission.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-francis-supports-crackdown-us-nuns-150211781.html
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By Caroline Valetkevitch
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks posted their worst day since November 7 on Monday as big declines in the price of gold, oil and other commodities fed a broad selloff in equities.
Weaker-than-expected data from China sparked the initial decline, but selling accelerated late in the session as reports of two explosions in Boston near the finish line of the Boston Marathon unnerved investors.
Commodity-related shares led stocks' losses, with gold suffering its worst two-day sell-off in 30 years as the China data fueled worries about the strength of the global economy. The SPDR Gold Shares ETF
Total trading volume was the second highest of the year, with about 8.5 billion shares changing hands on U.S. exchanges.
Analysts said the stock market had been vulnerable to a pullback, given the sharp gains since the start of the year as well as the Dow's and the S&P 500's recent record highs. The S&P 500 is still up 8.8 percent for the year.
"I don't think the market has much tolerance for bad news," said Uri Landesman, president of Platinum Partners in New York.
"There was a bad Chinese GDP number, which I think spooked people to start, and technical factors. Profit-taking started taking over. Late in the day, we were getting hit by reports that there were explosions in Boston. That gets people nervous."
At least two were killed and dozens were injured from the blasts.
The Dow Jones industrial average sank 265.86 points, or 1.79 percent, to close at 14,599.20. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 36.49 points, or 2.30 percent, to 1,552.36. The Nasdaq Composite Index lost 78.46 points, or 2.38 percent, to end at 3,216.49.
It was the biggest daily percentage drop for all three indexes since November 7, when the market sold off following the U.S. presidential election.
The biggest declining sectors were energy and materials. The S&P energy sector index lost 3.9 percent. The S&P materials sector index <.splrcm> also fell 3.9 percent.
Exxon Mobil
Data showed China's annual rate of growth eased back to 7.7 percent from the 7.9 percent rate of the previous quarter and below economists' forecast for an 8.0 percent expansion.
"The adverse feedback loop of all these things, particularly margin calls perhaps with gold, that's spilling over to stocks, and that's something most investors don't want to get in front of, so we've seen selling really dominate the day today," said Bucky Hellwig, senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management in Birmingham, Alabama.
The CBOE Gold ETF Volatility Index <.gvz>, which measures the market's expectation of 30-day volatility of gold prices by applying the VIX methodology to options on SPDR Gold Shares, shot up 61.7 percent - its largest percentage gain in its history. The index, often called the Gold VIX, hit a fresh 52-week high at 35.39.
Other stock decliners included Dish Network
The offer could thwart the proposed acquisition of Sprint by Japan's SoftBank Corp .
Among the day's gainers, Citigroup
First-quarter reports are expected to show only a small year-over-year gain in overall earnings since growth has slowed in recent quarters. S&P 500 earnings growth is estimated at 1.7 percent, based on results from 34 companies that have reported results so far and estimates for the rest, Thomson Reuters data showed.
Decliners outnumbered advancers by a ratio of more than 7 to 1 on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq.
(Additional reporting by Leah Schnurr and Doris Frankel; Editing by Kenneth Barry, Nick Zieminski and Jan Paschal)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nasdaq-drops-2-percent-wall-street-extends-losses-192157746--finance.html
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With the dangers of rogue asteroids made clear by the surprise explosion of a meteor over Russia in February, a non-profit organization is ramping up its effort to search for potentially hazardous space rocks near Earth.
The B612 Foundation?was started in 2002 by former NASA astronauts Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickart with colleagues. The organization aims to launch a space telescope called Sentinel in 2017 to catalog near-Earth asteroids, including those that may pose a danger to Earth.
To date, about 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids large enough to destroy the entire planet (about 1 kilometer, or 0.6 miles wide) have been discovered, but far fewer of the smaller, city-killing size (roughly 140 meters, or 460 feet, in diameter) have been found. [Photos: The Sentinel Space Telescope]
"We are essentially flying blind in a cosmic shooting gallery," Scott Hubbard, B612 program architect, told reporters on Tuesday (April 9) at the 29th annual National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.
This reality was starkly illustrated on Feb. 15, when a 55-foot-wide (17 meters) meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, just hours before an asteroid almost three times its size called 2012 DA14 flew uncomfortably close to Earth.
Sentinel's goal is to detect about 90 percent of this city-killing class of asteroids over a period of 6.5 years.
The $450 million mission is to be privately funded, though the foundation has partnered with NASA to share its data and use the agency's Deep Space Network of satellites to facilitate communications between Sentinel and the ground. NASA and lawmakers have said they enthusiastically support the mission and the B612 Foundation's efforts.
"We must better recognize what the private sector can do to aid our efforts to protect the world," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said during a Congressional hearing on the asteroid issue Wednesday (April 10).
B612 is also looking to partner with other private organizations, such as the solar system exploration non-profit organization The Planetary Society.
"We are hoping in the future to partner with B612, and we will find the asteroid that could have our name on it," said Bill Nye, the CEO of The Planetary Society. "We will ? this sounds extraordinary ? we will save humankind. It sounds like science fiction, but it's real."
B612's presentation at the National Space Symposium came one day before the group's CEO, former astronaut Ed Lu, spoke before the?House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Wednesday (April 10) on the importance of searching for potentially dangerous asteroids before they hit Earth.
Sentinel will fly in a Venus-like orbit around the sun, closer in than Earth. The observatory use an infrared telescope to search for space rocks as they near the sun, absorbing some of its light and re-radiating it as heat.
"If we build sophisticated night-vision goggles, we can see it," said John Troeltzsch, program manager for the Sentinel mission at Ball Aerospace, which has been contracted to build the spacecraft.
Ball was the primary contractor for NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as the agency's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, which, like Sentinel, required a large camera and the ability to point precisely at a given spot in the sky.?
"We have a lot of experience with very cold things observing very faint signals," Troeltzsch said. "If you take what we learned on Spitzer and what we learned on Kepler, you can derive Sentinel."
So far, B612 has raised about $2 million for the mission over the past eight months. It hopes to continue to raise $30 million to 40 million per year to keep the project on track.
Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitterand Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/non-profits-private-space-telescope-hunt-dangerous-asteroids-101050029.html
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By Daniel Wallis and Todd Benson
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday to vote whether to honor Hugo Chavez's dying wish for a longtime loyalist to continue his self-proclaimed socialist revolution or hand power to a young challenger vowing business-friendly changes.
Acting President Nicolas Maduro had a double-digit lead over opposition challenger Henrique Capriles in most polls heading into election day, buoyed by Chavez's public blessing before he died from cancer last month. But the gap narrowed in recent days, with one survey putting it at 7 percentage points.
Maduro supporters mobilized voters in the rough barrios of Caracas, where Chavez is revered as a hero of the poor, sounding pre-dawn bugle calls to rouse citizens to get out to vote. Lines formed under blistering sunshine at some voting centers, but many were notably shorter than they were at last October's election, when an ailing Chavez trounced Capriles.
Political strategists said that could mean there will be a surge in voting late in the day, or a smaller turnout than last year. Then, a record 80 percent of registered voters cast ballots following an aggressive get-out-the-vote campaign by the Chavista camp.
"We're going to elect Maduro president because he's following the path set by Chavez," Morelia Roa, a 58-year-old nurse, said after casting her ballot in the same working class Caracas district where Maduro voted.
Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver, has promised to deepen Chavez's "21st century socialism" if he triumphs. Capriles, an athletic 40-year-old who has generated widespread enthusiasm among the opposition, wants to take Venezuela down a more centrist path.
Whoever wins will inherit control of the world's biggest oil reserves in an OPEC nation, where stark political polarization is one of Chavez's many legacies. Also at stake is the generous economic aid Chavez showered on left-leaning Latin American governments from Cuba to Bolivia.
Following opposition complaints that some people were illegally helping elderly voters cast their ballots, Capriles urged his followers to report any violations of election laws. But he also stressed he would respect the outcome of the vote, whatever it might be.
"Today, all Venezuelans are reporters. If you see something irregular, take a picture, air it on social media," Capriles said after voting. "But let there be no doubt, we will respect the will of the people."
Electoral authorities said voting was going smoothly and that there was no evidence of irregularities. Given the deep mutual mistrust on both sides, some worry that a close or contested result could spark unrest.
Some 170 international observers were on hand, many from left-leaning political parties across Latin America. Polls are due to close at 6 p.m. (6:30 p.m. ET/2230 GMT), though voting could run longer if there are still lines.
Sunday's vote is the first presidential election in two decades without Chavez on the ballot. In many ways, though, it is all about the late president, who was viewed by the poor as a messiah for giving them a political voice and for funneling billions of dollars of oil revenue into social programs.
Maduro campaigned as a loyal disciple of Chavez, repeatedly calling himself an "apostle" and "son" of the late president. Chavez gave Maduro a huge boost by publicly endorsing him in his final speech in December before heading to Cuba for his last cancer operation.
True to form, Maduro dedicated his vote on Sunday to his political mentor.
"The last 21 years of my life have revolved around the dreams of a man, of a giant," an emotional Maduro said. "I never thought I'd be here. But here I am ... And I'm going to be president of the republic for the next six years."
POST-CHAVEZ CHALLENGES
If Maduro wins, he will immediately face big challenges as he tries to stamp his authority on a disparate ruling coalition while lacking his mentor's charisma, or the healthy state finances that Chavez enjoyed in last year's race.
It is hard to predict how he might do things his own way. Like many senior officials, Maduro was passionately loyal to Chavez and never voiced a different opinion in public.
Supporters say he could use his background as a union negotiator-turned-diplomat to build bridges, perhaps even with the United States after tensions during Chavez's 14-year rule.
But there was little sign of his softer side on the campaign trail. Maduro's rhetoric veered from outraged - alleging opposition plots to kill him using mercenaries - to light-hearted, such as poking fun at his often-cited tale of how he was visited by Chavez's spirit in the form of a bird.
More often he sounded indignant, accusing the "far right" of plotting a repeat of a short-lived coup against Chavez a decade ago if the opposition loses Sunday's vote.
Capriles will have an even tougher time if he pulls off an upset. One of the biggest challenges will be to win over suspicious supporters of Chavez and Maduro. Both repeatedly derided the opposition candidate as nothing more than a pampered rich kid, a traitor, and a puppet of "U.S. imperialism."
In last year's campaign, Capriles carefully avoided disparaging Chavez, in a bid to woo the poor. He has not afforded Maduro the same respect, denouncing him and his "coterie" as phony socialists who have enriched themselves while paying only lip service to Chavez's deeply held ideology.
Capriles touts a Brazilian-style model that mixes pro-business policies with heavy state spending on the poor, a recipe that made Brazil one of the world's hottest emerging economies in the past decade.
The opposition hopes bubbling discontent over daily problems such as rampant crime, high inflation, chronic power outages and occasional shortages of food staples and medicines will tip the vote in favor of Capriles.
"Capriles is our only hope. He's the best leader the opposition has had and could be a great president," Alberto Gomez, a 55-year-old bakery owner, said after voting in an upscale district of Caracas.
"The country is a mess," he added. "It's time to forget Chavez and create a new Venezuela outside of his shadow."
(Additional reporting by Deisy Buitrago and Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Kieran Murray, Jackie Frank and David Brunnstrom)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pro-chavez-venezuelans-mark-coup-anniversary-eve-election-001310986.html
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'Arrow' credits, 'Friends'-style.
Oliver Queen will be there for you when the rain stars to pour. "Arrow" is the latest show to have its opening credits re-done "Friends"-style by the internet, and the results are excellent.
The CW's superhero show gets the "Friends" opening credit treatment after a web genius put the The Rembrandts' "I'll Be There For You" into the "Battlestar Galactica" intro last week.
"Arrow" star Stephen Amell is a fan of the mashup. He posted the video on his Twitter page Thursday with the message, "This might be my favorite thing."
"Arrow" airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. EST on The CW.
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Pope Francis, right, meets with Mozambique's Prime Minister Alberto Vaquina on the occasion of their private audience in the pontiff's library, at the Vatican, Thursday, April 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandro Di Meo, pool)
Pope Francis, right, meets with Mozambique's Prime Minister Alberto Vaquina on the occasion of their private audience in the pontiff's library, at the Vatican, Thursday, April 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandro Di Meo, pool)
Pope Francis waves to faithful as he is driven through the crowd with his popemobile in St. Peter's Square prior to the start of his weekly general audience at the Vatican, Wednesday, April 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Francis blesses faithful as he is driven through the crowd with his popemobile in St. Peter's Square prior to the start of his weekly general audience at the Vatican, Wednesday, April 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Cardinals line up to salute Pope Francis, not pictured, at the end of his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, April 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Francis's skull cap is blown away in a gust of wind as he leaves with his popemobile St. Peter's Square after his weekly general audience at the Vatican, Wednesday, April 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
VATICAN CITY (AP) ? Pope Francis has spent much of his first month as pope charming ordinary Catholics with his ordinary yet extraordinary papal ways and making clear he is very much the boss when it comes to decisions as small as the shoes he wears to where he rests his head at night.
In the coming months, he'll face decisions of far greater import as he responds to demands from cardinals in far-flung dioceses and Vatican officials at home for an overhaul of the Holy See bureaucracy, the dysfunctional family business he inherited one month ago Saturday.
Given Francis' governing style and track record, it's likely he'll make these choices with an eye to efficiency, and very much alone.
Prelates are demanding term limits on Vatican jobs to prevent priests from becoming career bureaucrats. They want consolidated financial reports to remove the cloak of secrecy from the Vatican's murky finances. And they want regular Cabinet meetings where department heads actually talk to one another to make the Vatican a help to the church's evangelizing mission, not a hindrance.
"It just doesn't work either very quickly or very efficiently," U.S. Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said. "Take marriage cases: People shouldn't have to be asked to wait three, four, five, six years to get a response" for a request for an annulment.
Francis is meeting daily with department heads and on Friday made an impromptu visit to the secretariat of state, getting a handle on a government that was last reformed by Pope Paul VI a half-century ago and was shown by the leaks of papal documents last year to be infected by power struggles, incompetence and sheer ungovernability.
He has made one Vatican appointment so far, naming a member of his namesake Franciscan order to the important No. 2 spot at the Vatican's congregation for religious orders. His most eagerly-watched appointment has yet to come: that of the Vatican secretary of state, who runs the day-to-day administration of the Holy See. Currently, the position is held by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a 78-year-old canon lawyer whose administrative shortcomings have been blamed for many of the Vatican's current problems today.
George Weigel, a papal biographer who interviewed then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio last May for his new book "Evangelical Catholicism," said Francis understands well the problems of the Curia, or Vatican bureaucracy. He said Bergoglio "displayed a shrewd, but not cynical, grasp of just what was wrong with the church's central bureaucratic machinery, and why."
"I think we can expect the new pope to lead the church in a purification and renewal of the episcopate, the priesthood, the religious life, and the curia, because he understands that scandal, corruption, and incompetence are impediments" to the mission of spreading the faith, Weigel wrote in a recent essay.
Francis' austere style and track record governing the Jesuit order in his native Argentina and then the archdiocese of Buenos Aires has given reformers hope: Several cardinals have cited Francis' record as evidence that he has what it takes to make tough, unpopular decisions when necessary.
Bergoglio was named provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina in 1973 at the very young age of 36, and by all indications clashed with more left-leaning members of the order who were increasingly taking up the call of liberation theology, the belief that Christ's teachings justify fights against social injustices. His six-year term also spanned the initial years of the 1976-1983 military junta, which kidnapped and killed thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents. Two of Bergoglio's own priests were kidnapped, but later freed after his intervention.
"He knows how to govern," George said. "He's done all those in very difficult circumstances."
In the 2010 book "The Jesuit," written by his authorized biographer, Bergoglio explained his decision-making process, saying he always discounts his first ideas because they're "always wrong."
"One can ask for advice but, in the end, one must decide alone," he said. Doing so means making mistakes, and Bergoglio acknowledged he had made plenty in his lifetime.
"That's why the important thing is to ask God," he said.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who has become something of the ringleader of the reform group, said he had high hopes that Francis would turn the Holy See into a model of good governance given his background and no nonsense style.
"Sometimes in the past the curia has been an example of what not to do, instead of what to do," Dolan said in an interview. "We need to look to the Holy See and the Roman Curia as a model of good governance, of honesty, of simplicity, of frugality, of transparency, of candor, of raw Gospel service, of a lack of careerism, of people who are driven by virtue."
Dolan suggested that one crucial area of reform would be imposing term limits on Vatican bureaucrats to prevent them from becoming lifers. Such a move would both reduce the "careerism" that afflicts many a Vatican bureaucrat while also encouraging bishops around the world to lend Rome their best men knowing that they would be gone for only a few years, not life.
"You need a change in philosophy, in the guiding spirit," Dolan said.
Dolan said there was also no reason why more laymen and women couldn't be brought into the Vatican bureaucracy, particularly in the Vatican's offices for families or laity. And there's no reason not to trim back a government that has "mushroomed" over the years, he said. Already, Italian news reports have said Francis is mulling a reorganization and streamlining of the Vatican secretary of state.
Archbishop Claudio Mario Celli, who heads the Vatican's social communications office, wants greater communication within the various Vatican departments, including regularly scheduled meetings of department heads.
"We need a more synergetic activity," Celli said in an interview. "If we want to have a more effective service in the church, we need to have a symphonic approach."
George, the archbishop of Chicago, is seeking greater financial transparency. He is on the board of 15 cardinals who meet regularly to go over the Vatican's budget.
"The little bit I know comes from finding out what goes on during those meetings," George said. He called for greater financial transparency within the Vatican itself, including instituting consolidated financial reporting.
"How do you run an efficient government if the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing?" George said.
George dismissed speculation in the Italian media that the Vatican bank, the Institute for Works of Religion, might be closed as part of Francis' reform, as it's long been a source of scandal.
Doing so would be financial suicide for the Vatican, since it currently provides the pope with about 50 million euros ($65 million) a year in investment income using, among other things, assets of its account holders.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said any speculation about the IOR's possible closure "is purely hypothetical and isn't based on any believable or concrete facts."
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