DOJ expects to charge SAC Capital on Thursday: source

By Matthew Goldstein and Emily Flitter

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors are continuing to look for ways to build a criminal case against billionaire trader Steven A. Cohen at the same time as they prepare to announce criminal charges against his hedge fund on Thursday, people familiar with the investigation said.

Charges of securities fraud and wire fraud expected to be filed against the company, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

The charges against Cohen's $15 billion SAC Capital Advisors come after nearly seven years of investigations of his firm on allegations of insider trading.

Authorities do not plan to charge Cohen with any criminal wrongdoing, said the source.

A spokeswoman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara declined to comment as did a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

A spokesman for SAC Capital also declined to comment.

The filing of a criminal charge against SAC Capital could be a death-knell for the Stamford, Conn.-based firm that employs nearly 1,000 people and made billions for the 57-year-old Cohen.

It is likely that Wall Street firms that lend money and trade with SAC Capital would stop doing so after a criminal charge is filed. However, since more than $15 billion of the firm's assets represents money for Cohen and his employees, SAC Capital has substantial resources to continue functioning.

But even as federal authorities plan to move against Cohen's business, they are continuing to investigate the activities of some of his former employees, including former technology stock trader Dipak Patel, said the source familiar with the matter.

Patel, who once managed up to $1 billion for Cohen and left SAC Capital in 2011, was implicated in potentially improper trading by former SAC Capital analyst Wesley Wang, who pleaded guilty last July and became a cooperating witness for federal authorities.

Federal authorities have wiretapped communications involving Patel and have been considering criminal charges against the Merrick, N.Y. resident, said another person who has been briefed on the investigation. Neither Patel nor his attorney, Tai Park, returned phone calls seeking comment.

Federal prosecutors have debated filing a criminal charge against Cohen's 21-year-old hedge fund, one of the industry's most successful, for many months. The fund is one of the largest payers of commissions on Wall Street, generating more than $300 million a year in trading fees alone for Wall Street brokerages.

Several legal experts, including former federal prosecutors, said the decision to charge the hedge fund, but not Cohen, with wrongdoing would be a tacit admission that the nearly seven-year investigation failed to find sufficient evidence of trading on illicit inside information by Cohen.

A criminal charge against SAC Capital would be one of the most high-profile corporate cases since U.S. prosecutors indicted accounting firm Arthur Andersen for its role in the Enron scandal, a move that effectively forced the audit firm to go out of business.

Some legal experts have questioned whether it is appropriate for prosecutors to charge SAC Capital with criminal wrongdoing but not charge the firm's founder and leader.

"It's part of an overall level of frustration about this whole enterprise, and so they're trying to come at it from every possible angle to destroy this guy's business," said C. Evan Stewart, a defense lawyer and a partner Zuckerman Spaeder. "When the government gets an individual or company in its sights and decides that person's not worth doing business, it's going to use every tool."

If prosecutors do criminally charge SAC Capital, it will come after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission similarly decided it had insufficient evidence to file civil fraud charges against Cohen.

Instead, the SEC on July 19 filed an administrative order against Cohen charging him with failing to supervise his employees and spotting potential "red flags" involving allegations of insider trading by two of his employees.

An SAC spokesman said on Friday Cohen will vigorously defend the failure to supervise charge. A 46-page "white paper" prepared by SAC Capital's lawyer says Cohen is often too busy to read emails and never saw an email that regulators contend included a reference to inside information about computer company Dell Inc.'s earnings in summer 2008.

Federal authorities began looking into the possibility of filing a criminal charge against SAC Capital after former portfolio manager Jon Horvath pleaded guilty to passing on inside information about Dell during the summer of 2008 to his supervisor Michael Steinberg and traders at other hedge funds.

Earlier this year, prosecutors charged Steinberg with insider trading involving shares of Dell. Steinberg has pleaded not guilty.

To date, nine former and current SAC Capital employees have been implicated or charged with wrongful trading while at the firm.

For now, Wall Street appears to be shrugging at news reports that federal prosecutors are getting closer to filing criminal charges against SAC Capital.

Wall Street firms are continuing to trade with the fund as usual, according to several market sources.

A headhunter said in the past several weeks she had gotten more resumes from employees of SAC Capital, but "not a flood" of resumes.

Several investment firms that have money with SAC Capital, but submitted redemption notices in June to pull their dollars by year's end declined to comment. SAC Capital has said it plans to return more than $4 billion in outside investor money by year's end.

One outside investor voiced support for Cohen and SAC Capital, despite the firm's growing regulatory woes.

Ed Butowsky, managing director at Chapwood Capital Investment Management, which has several million dollars invested with SAC Capital, said: "I don't believe that criminal charges against the firm would impact Steve Cohen's traders and their ability to make money."

(Reporting by Matthew Goldstein and Emily Flitter, additional reporting by Katya Wachtel, Jennifer Ablan and Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dojs-decision-criminal-charges-against-sac-capital-nears-180005084.html

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Obama Budget Threatens Popular STEM Education Initiatives

Restructuring puts at risk hands-on science education for K-12 students

By Bonnie Rochman

Ayah Idris, 14, learns how to analyze DNA at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The program, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, is in danger of being cut. Image: Jeanne Ting Chowning

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Ayah Idris, 14, spent two weeks of her summer isolating strawberry DNA at a Seattle cancer research center, watching heart cells pulse in a dish and learning about ethical guidelines for animal research.

The Summer Fellows program ?sparked a little passion in me,? says Ayah, a rising 10th-grader whose parents are from Eritrea. ?I was kind of interested in science before, but I didn?t really know that much about it. Now I know that science in the real world is what I want to do.?

This type of inspiring dive into the rigors and rewards of a career in science would seem to be a perfect antidote to the national hand-wringing over the slipping state of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education in the U.S. In addition to offering the kinds of inquiry-based experiences that have been shown to best promote science learning, programs such as the Summer Fellows bring kids in contact with the latest scientific advances that have yet to be published in textbooks. Now, the funds that bolster these programs are in danger.

The Obama administration?s fiscal year 2014 budget lays out a sweeping restructuring intended to consolidate STEM education in the U.S. into three agencies?the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution?and to cut down on the inefficiency of overlapping initiatives. Funding overall for STEM programs is actually slated to increase by 6 percent, to $3 billion, under the proposal. But support for popular educational initiatives from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), along with those from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, appears to have been lost in the consolidation shuffle. It?s instructive to examine the changes to education about health, often the area of science? students identify with most.The $15.4 million Science Education Partnership Awards (SEPA) administered by the NIH, for instance, are on the chopping block: they fund 60 or so ? programs such as the one Idris attended, along with museum exhibits, classroom curricula, teacher professional development, mobile science lab buses and Web sites. Each year, SEPA programs reach more than?80,000?K-12?students in person and provide learning resources for millions of students and educators online; the SEPA grants account for the bulk of the money powering the nation?s informal health science education that takes place outside formal classroom programs.

Perhaps even more bewildering about the budget-trimming is the understanding among SEPA recipients that the NIH Office of Science Education, which oversees the coordination of the agency?s education efforts, is poised to shut its doors September 30, according to Louisa Stark, a genetics professor at the University of Utah. In total, the NIH is slated to lose $26 million. Sequestration cuts have made the situation more dire. ?Facing extraordinary budget uncertainties, it?s a question of prioritization,? says Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director at the NIH. Still, he remains hopeful that other coordinating agencies will take advantage of the NIH?s expertise. ?We continue to feel that K-12 STEM education is extremely important, and we want to do what we can to make sure any new programs launched are accurate and reflect the most recent modern science.?

Tabak wouldn?t confirm the scheduled closing of the NIH Office of Science Education, but Jeanne Ting Chowning, senior director at the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research who developed the Summer Fellows program, says employees are scrambling to find a repository for the Office?s storehouse of educational materials and searching for an new online home for reams of science curricula once the official Web site eventually goes dark.

?It really is an emergency,? says Chowning, whose organization promotes an understanding of biomedical research and ethics both in and out of the classroom. More than half her budget comes from the U.S. government; the rest is from membership, sponsors and foundations. ?The key is that these supplements from the Office of Science Education are developed and vetted by the highest-quality scientists we have in our country,? Chowning says. ?As a teacher, you know you can trust their integrity.?

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/chemistry/~3/FbMKjtYaLZg/article.cfm

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At least 35 dead, scores injured, as train derails in Spain

Lavandeira Jr / EPA

Scores are killed and injured in a train derailment in NW Spain.

By Becky Bratu and Jason Cumming, NBC News

At least 77 people were killed and up to 131 injured after a train crashed in northwestern Spain on Wednesday, officials said.

Images from the scene showed bodies covered in blankets and towels lying next to toppled and crushed carriages as a plume of smoke billowed from the wreckage near Santiago de Compostela. Rescuers worked to pull survivors out of broken windows.?

"It was going so quickly. ... It seems that on a curve the train started to twist, and the wagons piled up one on top of the other," passenger Ricardo Montesco told Cadena Ser radio station, according to Reuters. "A lot of people were squashed on the bottom. We tried to squeeze out of the bottom of the wagons to get out and we realized the train was burning ... I was in the second wagon and there was fire ... I saw corpses."

There are reports of as many as 100 people wounded and doezens dead in a train derailment in northwestern Spain. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

The train?was traveling between Madrid and Ferrol. The crash occurred as Santiago de Compostela prepared for the festival of Saint James, when thousands of Christian pilgrims from across the world pack the streets.?

"The scene is shocking, it's Dante-esque," the head of Spain's Galicia region, Alberto Nunez Feijoo,?said in a radio interview, according to Reuters.

Feijoo said it was too early to say what had caused the derailment.?

El Pais newspaper cited sources close to the investigation as saying the train was travelling at over twice the speed limit on a sharp curve. NBC News was unable to immediately confirm the report.

Reuters quoted a source as saying that investigators were "moving away from the hypothesis of sabotage or attack."

A statement released by Renfe, a?state-owned company that operates freight and passenger trains, read:?"An Alvia train traveling between Madrid and Ferrol has derailed upon entering the station of Santiago de Compostela at 8:41 p.m. [local time]. The train was traveling on high-speed tracks carrying a total of 218 passengers in addition to the crew."

Reuters

Rescue workers pull victims from a train crash near Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on Wednesday.

A Spanish government spokeswoman said Prime Minister?Mariano Rajoy, who was born in Santiago de Compostela, was due to visit the accident site on Thursday morning.

The crash happened on the eve of the city's main festival, which focuses on St. James, one of Jesus's 12 disciples, whose remains are said to rest in the city.?

Santiago de Compostela's tourism board said all the festivities, including Wednesday's traditional High Mass at the centuries-old cathedral, were canceled as the city went into mourning.?

Wednesday's derailment was one of the worst rail accidents in Europe over the past 25 years.

In November 2000, 155 people were killed when a fire in a tunnel engulfed a funicular train packed with skiers in Austria.

In Montenegro, up to 46 people were killed and nearly 200 injured in 2006 when a packed train derailed and plunged into a ravine outside the capital, Podgorica.

And in Spain, 41 people were killed the same year when an underground train derailed and overturned in a tunnel just before entering the Jesus metro station in Valen

Reuters contributed to this report.?

This story was originally published on Wed Jul 24, 2013 9:23 PM EDT

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663309/s/2f1e7c08/sc/11/l/0Lworldnews0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A70C240C196619440Eat0Eleast0E350Edead0Escores0Einjured0Eas0Etrain0Ederails0Ein0Espain0Dlite/story01.htm

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Mechanical tension promotes nerve regeneration of skin pathological scars

Public release date: 23-Jul-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Meng Zhao
eic@nrren.org
86-138-049-98773
Neural Regeneration Research

Scars are prone to appear at high tension parts, such as the sternum, shoulder and back, which are serious clinical problems. Surgeons reduce scar formation through Z, W, V-Y flap variation and reducing blade tension, but its specific mechanism are still not very clear. Hu Xiao and colleagues from Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University verified that mechanical tension contributed to the formation of a hyperplastic scar in the back skin of rats, in conjunction with increases in both nerve density and nerve growth factor expression in the scar tissue. These experimental findings indicate that the cutaneous nervous system plays a role in hypertrophic scar formation caused by mechanical tension, which have been published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 17, 2013).

###

Article: " Mechanical tension promotes skin nerve regeneration by upregulating nerve growth factor expression," by Hu Xiao, Dechang Wang, Ran Huo, Yibing Wang, Yongqiang Feng, Qiang Li (Department of Burn and Plastic Surgery, Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, Jinan 250021, Shandong Province, China)

Xiao H, Wang DC, Huo R, Wang YB, Feng YQ, Li Q. Mechanical tension promotes skin nerve regeneration by upregulating nerve growth factor expression. Neural Regen Res. 2013;8(17):1576-1581.

Contact: Meng Zhao
eic@nrren.org
86-138-049-98773
Neural Regeneration Research
http://www.nrronline.org/

Full text: http://www.sjzsyj.org:8080/Jweb_sjzs/CN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=626

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 23-Jul-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Meng Zhao
eic@nrren.org
86-138-049-98773
Neural Regeneration Research

Scars are prone to appear at high tension parts, such as the sternum, shoulder and back, which are serious clinical problems. Surgeons reduce scar formation through Z, W, V-Y flap variation and reducing blade tension, but its specific mechanism are still not very clear. Hu Xiao and colleagues from Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University verified that mechanical tension contributed to the formation of a hyperplastic scar in the back skin of rats, in conjunction with increases in both nerve density and nerve growth factor expression in the scar tissue. These experimental findings indicate that the cutaneous nervous system plays a role in hypertrophic scar formation caused by mechanical tension, which have been published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 17, 2013).

###

Article: " Mechanical tension promotes skin nerve regeneration by upregulating nerve growth factor expression," by Hu Xiao, Dechang Wang, Ran Huo, Yibing Wang, Yongqiang Feng, Qiang Li (Department of Burn and Plastic Surgery, Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, Jinan 250021, Shandong Province, China)

Xiao H, Wang DC, Huo R, Wang YB, Feng YQ, Li Q. Mechanical tension promotes skin nerve regeneration by upregulating nerve growth factor expression. Neural Regen Res. 2013;8(17):1576-1581.

Contact: Meng Zhao
eic@nrren.org
86-138-049-98773
Neural Regeneration Research
http://www.nrronline.org/

Full text: http://www.sjzsyj.org:8080/Jweb_sjzs/CN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=626

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-07/nrr-mtp072313.php

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Canada's International Drug Patent Problem

In the eyes of the United States, Canada has a drug problem.

Granted, this isn't an illegal narcotics or drug cartel problem. But in the world of international trade, the problem is pretty bad. In fact, it's serious enough to land Canada on the "Watch List" in the U.S. Trade Representative's "Special 301 Report"?a report released annually that evaluates the intellectual property rights protection and enforcement of the United States's trading partners.

So how exactly did Canada end up on this list? It boils down to this: The United States and the world's major multinational pharmaceutical companies are unhappy with the way Canada interprets its drug patent laws.

"Canada is an outlier," says Patrick Kierans, a senior partner at Norton Rose Fulbright in Toronto who has represented multinational pharmaceutical companies. "It has a higher standard for drug patents than anywhere else in the world."

Defenders of Canada's patent system insist that this is not true. Other countries also have standards that differ from that of the U.S., they say, and patent systems worldwide are far from unified. Nevertheless, Canada is on the USTR's "Watch List"?a place usually reserved for developing economies.

This is actually an upgrade from years past, when Canada sat on the U.S.'s "Priority Watch List," keeping company with such notorious big-time IP infringers as China and Russia. The basis for Canada's lowly status in the eyes of the U.S. for four consecutive years had been its copyright laws and its commercial-scale trafficking of counterfeit products. But with passage in 2012 of Canada's Copyright Modernization Act, and the introduction this year of Canada's Counterfeit Products Act, these problems are deemed well on the way to being fixed.

Canada's drug patents, however, are another story. In its report, the USTR writes that the U.S. has "serious concerns" about Canada's treatment of pharmaceutical patents. It criticizes the country's administrative process for regulatory approval of pharmaceutical products, which curbs the right to appeal. And more pointedly, it expresses concern about the impact of Canada's "heightened" utility requirement for patents.

That utility requirement, in fact, has Big Pharma up in arms. It has prompted an international trade dispute that not only challenges a sovereign nation's legal system but also could end up costing Canadian taxpayers as much as $100 million. It raises broader questions that arise in a world where the value of intellectual property is rapidly outpacing that of real property, but where patent systems still vary from country to country.

In November of last year, Eli Lilly and Company notified the government of Canada that it intends to challenge the country's standards for granting patents, claiming that they violate provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The company launched its attack after Canadian courts invalidated Lilly's patent for Strattera, a drug used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In its formal filings, it demanded $100 million in compensation from Canada, saying that is the amount the patent invalidation cost the company.

So how is an individual company, albeit the tenth-largest pharmaceutical corporation in the world, able to demand $100 million in compensation from a nation of 35 million people? The drugmaker filed what is known as an investor-state dispute, which, under provisions of some international trade treaties, allows companies to initiate challenges against foreign governments.

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Source: http://www.law.com/corporatecounsel/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202611865529&rss=rss_cc

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Mexico clashes between police and armed drug gang leave 22 dead

But gang violence surged throughout Mexico, leaving 70,000 people in its wake when Calderon left office in December, and a powerful new cartel, the Knights Templar, emerged in Michoacan.

Osorio Chong has insisted that the strategy ordered by current President Enrique Pena Nieto will be different than his predecessor's, with a single command, close co-ordination between various authorities, greater use of intelligence assets, and a development programme.

Pena Nieto took office in December vowing to switch the focus towards reducing the levels of violence. He has since launched a crime prevention programme but he says troops will stay on the ground until the murder rate goes down.

Fed up with crime, vigilante groups have appeared in recent months and clashed with the Knights Templar cartel, notably in the Tierra Caliente region known as a hot spot of gang violence in the state of 4.3 million people.

Drug gangs have existed for decades in this western state, where they grow marijuana and opium poppies and produce synthetic drugs in makeshift labs before shipping them to the United States.

Edited for Telegraph.co.uk by Barney Henderson

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568301/s/2f169760/sc/11/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cnews0Cworldnews0Ccentralamericaandthecaribbean0Cmexico0C10A1990A260CMexico0Eclashes0Ebetween0Epolice0Eand0Earmed0Edrug0Egang0Eleave0E220Edead0Bhtml/story01.htm

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The Haunted Stone Yard

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A young teenager named Noah, he's not very social, do be warned. He's no normal teen.

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