Former Senator DeMint takes center stage in immigration debate

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When Jim DeMint announced in December that he was leaving the U.S. Senate to head the Heritage Foundation think tank, he said he thought he could wield more influence outside rather than inside the Congress.

Any doubt about that may have been put to rest on Monday with the release of a study by the foundation lambasting a bipartisan immigration proposal in the Senate as a budget-buster that would cost taxpayers trillions of dollars.

While the report was written by a scholar, Robert Rector, the main attraction was DeMint. That was true for boosters of the study and, as it turned out, for as detractors as well, who used DeMint's name to discredit the findings.

The publicity tour started on Sunday when the former South Carolina senator plugged the Heritage study on ABC's "This Week," not normally a venue for think-tank wonks.

It continued on Monday with DeMint defending it in advance on Fox News. Hours later, DeMint presided at the news conference where the report was released.

"He obviously has some influence as a former senator," said Tevi Troy, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush.

Troy said the immigration fight would be an "interesting test case" of Heritage's clout since it is the first big issue it is taking on under DeMint's leadership.

Having DeMint as the star cut both ways, however. He is a long-time opponent of immigration reform and as a senator he helped kill a similar bill in 2007. Critics of the Heritage Foundation report - and there were many - used that fact to attack the study.

Among the most outspoken was Haley Barbour, the ex-governor of Mississippi and former head of the Republican National Committee. He noted pointedly on a conference call with reporters that "it was probably more than a coincidence" that Heritage, under DeMint, would be opposing the immigration bill. The study, Barbour said, "is a political document."

DeMint's "reputation as a researcher is, um, questionable," said a statement from America's Voice, a liberal advocacy group that favors the Senate legislation.

The content of the Heritage study was controversial enough. It estimated that the bill's provisions giving undocumented immigrants a 13-year path to citizenship - "amnesty" in DeMint's words - would cost $6.3 trillion over a lifetime because of government benefits that would be paid to them.

Conservative critics of the study called it deeply flawed because it failed to consider the benefits to the economy of the bipartisan immigration bill, which includes provisions sought by industry to fill high-tech and low-tech jobs that companies say are going begging.

OPENING SALVO

The foundation said it followed respected scholarly methodology in producing the study. "We are a research institution here," said Derrick Morgan, a Heritage vice president. "We can't necessarily speak to the motivations of other people. "But we very much want the fiscal costs to be part of the debate because it protects the American taxpayer."

The argument about the study, which took place just days before debate is scheduled to begin on amendments to the Senate immigration bill, marked the opening salvo in a war of talking points and studies that will play out over the next few months.

Heritage is at odds with liberal think tanks such as the Center for American Progress and also with analysts at the libertarian Cato Institute as well as some scholars at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

The divisions mirror a split within the Republican party itself, with stalwarts such as Barbour as well as Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a rising star within the party, supporting immigration reform. Others such as Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have lined up against it.

DeMint, a leader in the conservative Tea Party movement, is known for his outspokenness. In 2009, he helped to fire up conservative opposition to President Barack Obama's proposal to overhaul the healthcare system by declaring that the bill would Obama's Waterloo. Republicans were unable to stop the bill from becoming law.

DeMint's role is all the more interesting because of his ties to Rubio, a member of the so-called Gang of Eight senators who wrote the immigration reform bill under consideration.

DeMint was a strong supporter of Rubio's Senate candidacy in 2010 and the Florida senator, who is seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2016, has credited DeMint with helping him to win the seat.

"Immigration reform pits Rubio against mentor DeMint," said a headline on a CNN blog post.

"By the time that appeared on Monday afternoon, DeMint, unfazed, was back on television, telling Fox News: "what we need to do is put aside this whole idea of amnesty and fix our system one piece at a time."

The immigration bill, he said, "is going to be another Obamacare."

(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro. Editing by Fred Barbash and Christopher Wilson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/former-senator-demint-takes-center-stage-immigration-debate-001600248.html

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'Fast & Furious 6' Peels Out Nine New Clips

It always feels like overkill when a studio releases a large number of clips from a movie in anticipation of its impending release date, but that's exactly what Universal Pictures has done with "Fast & Furious 6." Fortunately this series has proved time and again that it doesn't need a brilliant marketing strategy to get [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2013/05/06/fast-furious-6-nine-new-clips/

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Unusual comparison nets new sleep loss marker

May 3, 2013 ? For years, Paul Shaw, PhD, a researcher at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has used what he learns in fruit flies to look for markers of sleep loss in humans.

Shaw reverses the process in a new paper, taking what he finds in humans back to the flies and gaining new insight into humans as a result: identification of a human gene that is more active after sleep deprivation.

"I'm calling the approach cross-translational research," says Shaw, associate professor of neurobiology. "Normally we go from model to human, but there's no reason why we can't take our studies from human to model and back again."

Shaw and his colleagues plan to use the information they are gaining to create a panel of tests for sleep loss. The tests may one day help assess a person's risk of falling asleep at the wheel of a car or in other dangerous contexts.

PLOS One published the results on April 24.

Scientists have known for years that sleep disorders and disruption raise blood serum levels of interleukin 6, an inflammatory immune compound. Shaw showed that this change is also detectable in saliva samples from sleep-deprived rats and humans.

Based on this link, Shaw tested the activity of other immune proteins in humans to see if any changed after sleep loss. The scientists took saliva samples from research participants after they had a normal night's sleep and after they stayed awake for 30 hours. They found two immune genes whose activity levels rose during sleep deprivation.

"Normally we would do additional human experiments to verify these links," Shaw says. "But those studies can be quite expensive, so we thought we'd test the connections in flies first."

The researchers identified genes in the fruit fly that were equivalent to the human genes, but their activity didn't increase when flies lost sleep. When they screened other, similar fruit fly genes, though, the scientists found one that did.

"We've seen this kind of switch happen before as we compared families of fly genes and families of human genes," Shaw says. "Sometimes the gene performing a particular role will change, but the task will still be handled by a gene in the same family."

When the scientists looked for the human version of the newly identified fly marker for sleep deprivation, they found ITGA5 and realized it hadn't been among the human immune genes they screened at the start of the study. Testing ITGA5 activity in the saliva samples revealed that its activity levels increased during sleep deprivation.

"We will need more time to figure out how useful this particular marker will be for detecting sleep deprivation in humans," Shaw says. "In the meantime, we're going to continue jumping between our flies and humans to maximize our insights."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Washington University School of Medicine. The original article was written by Michael C. Purdy.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Matthew S. Thimgan, Laura Gottschalk, Cristina Toedebusch, Jennifer McLeland, Allan Rechtschaffen, Marcia Gilliland-Roberts, Stephen P. Duntley, Paul J. Shaw. Cross-Translational Studies in Human and Drosophila Identify Markers of Sleep Loss. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e61016 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0061016

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/Myxdqnu4Xbw/130503230415.htm

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Stocks gain after unemployment claims fall

NEW YORK (AP) ? The stock market is all about jobs this week.

Stocks rose Thursday after unemployment claims fell to a five-year low. A day earlier it was just the opposite; the market slumped after companies added just 119,000 jobs in April, the fewest in seven months, according to payroll processor ADP. And stocks could swing again Friday when the government's closely watched monthly employment report is released.

"Everyone is looking to the April jobs numbers," said Tyler Vernon, chief investment officer at Biltmore Capital. "People are more confident that it was an anomaly last month and are looking for some bigger numbers."

Economists forecast that the employers added 160,000 jobs last month. Stocks slumped April 5 when the government said 88,000 jobs were added, less than half the number forecast.

Signs of increased hiring have supported this year's surge in stocks and pushed the market to record highs. The run-up has started to falter in recent weeks on concerns that the global economy is slowing. More jobs should boost consumer spending, a key driver of U.S. growth.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 130.63 points to 14,831.58 on Thursday, an increase of 0.9 percent. The index lost 138 points a day earlier. The Standard & Poor's 500 index climbed 14.89 points, or 0.9 percent, to 1,597.59, also recovering almost all of its losses from a day earlier.

Applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to 324,000, the fewest since January 2008, the Labor department reported before the market opened.

The outlook for global growth also got a boost after the European Central bank cuts its benchmark interest rate a quarter of a percentage point to 0.5 percent.

The euro fell a penny against the dollar to $1.3060. The price of gold rose $21.40, or 1.5 percent, to $1,467.60 an ounce. The price of crude oil rose $2.96, or 3.3 percent, to $93.99 a barrel.

Higher profits from CBS, Facebook and other companies also lifted stocks Thursday.

Broadcaster CBS reported a 22 percent jump in first-quarter earnings as big events like the Super Bowl pushed advertising revenue higher. Its stock rose 95 cents, or 2 percent, to $47.35.

GM rose 98 cents, or 3.2 percent, to $31.16 after it lost less money in Europe and beat Wall Street's expectations for first-quarter profit. The automaker's earnings of 67 cents a share beat the 54 cents predicted by Wall Street analysts who follow the company.

Facebook gained $1.54, or 5.6 percent, to $28.98 after its first-quarter revenue rose 38 percent, surpassing Wall Street expectations. Nearly a third of the company's advertising revenue came from mobile devices, a greater share than analysts had expected.

The social networking site bucked the trend for companies reporting in the first quarter. Most are exceeding analysts' expectations on earnings, but falling short on revenue.

"If we continue to see several more quarters like this, investors would start to get nervous," said Andrew Milligan, head of global strategy at Standard Life Investments. He says that growth needs to pick up in the major export markets, like China and Europe, for U.S. companies to maintain earnings growth.

Facebook's earnings also boosted information technology stocks. The industry rose 1.4 percent, the most of the 10 groups in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.

Technology stocks have surged in the past two weeks, after lagging the S&P 500 in the first three months of the year. Their 5.7 percent increase in 2013 still trails the 18.5 percent gain for health care companies, the best performing industry in the index.

Seagate Technology was another technology company that gained Thursday. The company, which makes hard drives, jumped $2.69, or 7.3 percent, to $39.63, even after the company reported a slump in sales and earnings. The decline wasn't as bad as analysts had expected, though, and Seagate handily beat estimates for both sales and revenue.

Earnings at companies in the S&P 500 are at record levels. They are forecast to increase by 4.4 percent in the first quarter and keep rising throughout the year, according to S&P Capital IQ data.

Gains for technology companies helped push the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite higher. The index advanced 41.49 points, or 1.3 percent, to 3,340.62.

Stocks are rebounding after a slump Wednesday, when reports of slower manufacturing growth and hiring dragged down markets. The Dow had its worst drop in two weeks. The market was down even after the Federal Reserve Bank reaffirmed its plan to continue its stimulus program, which is now five years old.

For the year, the Dow is still up 13 higher, the S&P 500 is up 12 percent.

The gains suggest that the market is getting ahead of itself, given a lackluster outlook for the economy, said Uri Landesman of Platinum Partners. He thinks the stock market is set for a pullback.

In government bond trading, the yield on the 10-year note was unchanged at 1.63 percent, matching its low for the year. Bonds have gained as inflation remains tame.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stocks-gain-unemployment-claims-fall-164802556--finance.html

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