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By Mark Felsenthal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama urged Congress on Monday to summon the "political courage" to quickly pass immigration reform.
Speaking at a naturalization ceremony for 28 new U.S. citizens at the White House, Obama said he was pleased with steps made toward reforming immigration laws, he wants the process to be complete within months.
"I expect a bill to be put forward. I expect the debate to begin next month," he said. "I want to sign that bill into law as soon as possible."
Obama pointed to the accomplishments of many of the 28 people who had just become U.S. citizens and said immigrants had reinvigorated the labor force and benefited businesses.
"If we want to keep attracting the best and brightest the world has to offer, we need to do a better job of welcoming them," he said.
Reforms making it easier for undocumented foreigners to become citizens have gained momentum in Congress since Hispanic voters overwhelmingly supported Obama in November's presidential election. Recent polls show strong support for creating a way for undocumented foreigners to become U.S. citizens.
Congress is on two-week recess but is expected to look more closely at immigration and other domestic issues after being consumed for weeks with budget matters.
A group of eight Democratic and Republican senators is working on a plan that would create a 10- or 15-year process that leads to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally.
The path to citizenship may be called a path to a "green card" to soften opposition among Republicans, although Senate aides have characterized that as a semantic distinction.
The so-called green card - which is no longer green - allows a foreigner to live and work in the United States and ultimately to apply for citizenship.
Lawmakers are trying to produce a bill by next month. A Senate vote could be held in June or July. One obstacle is the divide between business and labor organizations over how to manage the flow of unskilled labor into the United States.
Obama urged lawmakers to push through to a conclusion.
"We've got to finish the job, because this issue is not new," he said. "We've just got, at this point, to work up the political courage to do what's required to be done."
(Editing by Christopher Wilson)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-presses-congress-act-quickly-immigration-reform-173034096.html
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Mar. 25, 2013 ? Solutions that meet the broad, varied, and often competing priorities of conservation are difficult to come by. Research published in the March 28 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a hard look at why, in an effort to find ways to resolve the issue.
"People often think of conservation solutions that are effective, cost-efficient, and equitable -- the so-called triple bottom line solutions -- as the holy grail, the best possible outcome," said Ben Halpern, researcher at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), and the lead author of the paper titled, "Achieving the triple bottom line in the face of inherent trade-offs among social equity, economic return and conservation."
As stakeholders, conservationists, and governments work diligently to achieve cost-efficient and effective conservation solutions that are also fair, it becomes obvious that reaching one goal often comes at the expense of another.
"We developed and tested methods for discovering these ideal solutions and found a surprising result," said Halpern. "As you increase the equity of how conservation benefits are distributed to people, you compromise your ability to maximize conservation outcomes."
To examine the relationship of equity, which relates to how a person or group perceives the relative availability (or deprivation) of resources, to the other conservation goals in the triple bottom line, the researchers used three very different case studies dealing with marine conservation to test their ideas: the process to create marine protected areas (MPAs) off the central coast of California; the southeast Misool MPA in Raja Ampat in eastern Indonesia; and the Coral Triangle in southeast Asia. In each case, as conservation scores and outcomes were increased (usually the result of limiting access to certain areas or the amount and/or species that can be taken from those areas), equity declined.
Meanwhile, the study also showed that both equity and conservation could be achieved, but by raising total budgets, sacrificing the goal of cost-efficiency.
Although triple bottom line outcomes are touted as ideal, said Halpern, the reality is that few people probably actually want such outcomes.
"Different people have more or less invested in managed systems and so don't necessarily expect to receive equal benefits," he said. "For example, if I've fished a place for 40 years and based my entire livelihood on that, whereas my neighbor just moved to town and fishes once a month recreationally, why should we be treated equally when it comes to making decisions about managing fisheries?"
Carissa Klein, a co-author from The University of Queensland, pointed out that "although equity can compromise conservation outcomes, it plays a significant role in conservation." Highly inequitable solutions, according to the study, decrease the likelihood of success because those disenfranchised have little motivation to adhere to conservation programs. But, while increased equity increases the likelihood of self-enforcement, it is also likely that ignoring a vocal and powerful minority will lower the chances of success.
So are there any decisions that can guarantee achieving the triple bottom line of effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and equitable conservation outcomes? Yes and no, said Klein. "It depends some on how one defines equity, and people have different types of equity that they care about. It may be easy to have equity in stakeholder engagement, i.e. all affected parties engaged in the process of making a decision, even if the outcome is inequitable. This may ultimately satisfy all the stakeholder groups."
"There's no single way to achieve triple bottom line outcomes," said Halpern. "Instead, we provide a tool for transparently and quantitatively understanding where, why, and how one can increase the chances of achieving these outcomes, and in which cases it is not likely possible," he said.
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FILE - In this March 24, 2013, file photo, Florida Gulf Coast's Sherwood Brown, center, celebrates with teammates after their 81-71 win over San Diego State in a third-round game in the NCAA college basketball tournament in Philadelphia. Florida Gulf Coast became the first No. 15 seed to make the Sweet 16. (AP Photo/Michael Perez, File)
FILE - In this March 24, 2013, file photo, Florida Gulf Coast's Sherwood Brown, center, celebrates with teammates after their 81-71 win over San Diego State in a third-round game in the NCAA college basketball tournament in Philadelphia. Florida Gulf Coast became the first No. 15 seed to make the Sweet 16. (AP Photo/Michael Perez, File)
FILE - In this March 24, 2013, file photo, Miami head coach Jim Larranaga celebrates with fans after their 63-59 win over Illinois in a third-round game of the NCAA college basketball tournament in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Welcome back to BracketRacket, the one-stop shopping place for all your NCAA needs.
Today's edition includes a social media bracket, a touching moment between competitors and a little dance called the Larranaga Shuffle. Oh, and we've got Dickie V and his new rival, dolphins. Not the Dolphins, just dolphins.
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SOCIAL MEDIA BRACKET
The advent of social media has added to the NCAA tournament experience, allowing fans to comment before, during and after every game, creating an extra buzz to March Madness.
But can social media have an impact on the games?
The answer is, maybe.
Using an algorithm it calls "Prime Buzz," the digital marketing company Prime Visibility tracked the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament to see if the buzz created on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels reflected how the teams did on the court.
In other words, do teams with the greater amount of buzz win more games?
It seems so.
After tracking social media conversations from 24 hours before the start of games until the end of games in the first round, Prime Visibility found that 25 of the 32 teams with more buzz won, as did 11 of 16 in the second round.
The team that generated the most buzz was Florida Gulf Coast University, the first No. 15 seed to reach the Sweet 16, and the lowest was Northwestern State, which didn't make it out of the first round.
The highest discrepancy between teams was FGCU's 95.48 percent to 4.52 percent for San Diego State.
Check out the bracket here: http://bit.ly/16dYAEf
___
TOUCHING MOMENT
In the moments after Florida Gulf Coast knocked off San Diego State to reach the Sweet 16, Aztecs guard Jamaal Franklin didn't race off the floor. Instead, he tracked down FGCU's Sherwood Brown to give him congratulations in one of the weekend's more heartfelt moments.
Franklin hugged Brown as he gave him some words of encouragement, tapped him on the chest as he kept talking and hugged again before separating.
Here's the moment http://goo.gl/ZJrc4 and what Franklin had to say about it after:
"I just told him just keep being the leader that he is, make sure the ball is in his hands, make sure he does what he has to do to keep his team rolling," Franklin said during San Diego State's postgame news conference. "And just make sure they stay together because those guys we played against right now are just like us, they all love each other and they all play together. They just want to win. And you can see at the end of the game, a lot of teams win games and just leave the court, but they embraced it. They embraced it together, not just one another."
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THE HEADLINES
The day after Florida Gulf Coast's victory over San Diego State to reach NCAA tournament's Sweet 16, the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., ran a large photo of the 15th-seeded Eagles celebrating with the headline: "SWEET 15!"
Turns out, sweet was a common theme in many headlines on Monday ? at least for teams that won ? as you can see in this link from Sports Illustrated's Extra Mustard showing selected front pages from around the country: http://bit.ly/13q4FzT
Fox Sports also unleashed this headline: OMFG-CU! And no, it's not text-speak for something crass. It stands for Oh My, Florida Gulf Coast University!
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DOIN' THE LARRANAGA
Miami coach Jim Larranaga asked his players to be fighters and they came through, clinching a spot in the Sweet 16. Once they did, Larranaga celebrated by his own version of the Muhammad Ali Shuffle, something we've dubbed "The Larranaga Shuffle." See his moves in this clip: http://bit.ly/10bC4Yz
And some more Hurricanes video, of senior Justin Gamble pulling off a video bomb: http://bit.ly/XChjE2
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DICKIE V vs. DOLPHINS
ESPN analyst Dick Vitale did a lot of trash talking to some dolphins as he picked against them in a bracket challenge. http://bit.ly/YDgv1Q
OK, we know it's TV schtick, part of a promotion with Allstate.
Still, Dickie V has to be looking over his shoulder at this point.
The dolphins, from Atlanta's Georgia Aquarium, have picked 30 games correctly in this what's-going-to-happen-next tournament, just one behind Vitale. Among the dolphins' gets were Wichita State over top-seeded Gonzaga, Florida Gulf Coast over Georgetown and La Salle over Kansas State.
To be fair, Vitale is in better shape for the rest of the bracket. He has Louisville beating Indiana in the title game while the dolphins' Final Four teams have all been eliminated.
___
STAT OF THE DAY
You're bracket may be busted, but you're still watching.
Ratings for the NCAA tournament are the highest in 15 years and up 27 percent from last year. The broadcasts on CBC, TBS, TNT and truTV averaged a 5.8 household rating and 12 share, the highest rating for the tournament's first week since 1998. That year, the rating was 5.9 and 15 share.
The broadcasts also had the highest viewership since 1993, averaging 8.9 million total viewers ? a 9 percent increase from a year ago.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Well, I'm glad I'm 62 instead of 42 right now. I think I can speak for all the commissioners ? this is something that I don't think any of us enjoy. However we react is going to impact somebody else, and, look, it's been going on all the way to just about all the leagues. I don't think any of us think this is the highlight of our career experiences by any stretch." ? Colonial Athletic Association Commissioner Tom Yeager after George Mason became the latest team to switch conferences by announcing it was leaving for the Atlantic-10.
___
Follow John Marshall on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johnmarshallap
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T-Mobile has been planning on moving solely to no-contract plans for several months now, and today is the day they go into effect. Clicking on over to T-Mobile's website reveals no-contract plans as your only option to receive service, with some seriously competitive pricing. The default plan setup is one that offers 1 line of service, with unlimited talk, text, and data -- which is throttled (to 2G speeds) after 500MB -- for $50 per month. You can then slide up the scale of data in 2GB increments from 500MB to 12GB. Each bump in data adds $10 to the monthly plan, so the range is $50 for 500MB up to $110 for 12GB of data, with hotspot/tethering included in the price at each level. Hit the break for more details
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/INe8E4ywaoo/story01.htm
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Baylor's Kimetria Hayden (1), Jordan Madden (3), Brittney Griner, rear, and Odyssey Sims, right, celebrate a score in the second half of a first-round game against Prairie View A&M in the women's NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 24, 2013, in Waco, Texas. Baylor won 82-40. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
Baylor's Kimetria Hayden (1), Jordan Madden (3), Brittney Griner, rear, and Odyssey Sims, right, celebrate a score in the second half of a first-round game against Prairie View A&M in the women's NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 24, 2013, in Waco, Texas. Baylor won 82-40. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
Baylor's Jordan Madden, left, and Brittney Griner (42) watch as Odyssey Sims (0), right, blocks a shot-attempt by Prairie View A&M guard Jeanette Jackson (1) in the first half of a first-round game in the women's NCAA college basketball tournament on Sunday March 24, 2013, in Waco, Texas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
Baylor's Brittney Griner (42) dunks over Prairie View A&M in the second half of a first-round game in the women's NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 24, 2013, in Waco, Texas. Griner had 33-points in the 82-40 Baylor win. (AP Photo/The Waco Tribune-Herald, Rod Aydelotte)
Duke's Allison Vernerey, right, and Hampton's Nicole Hamilton struggle for possession of the ball during the second half of a first-round game in the women's NCAA college basketball tournament in Durham, N.C., Sunday, March 24, 2013. Duke won 67-51. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
Penn State guard Dara Taylor (2) stumbles and flips the ball up for two-points in front of Cal Poly's Nikol Allison, left, and Ariana Elegado (5) during the first half of a first-round game in the women's NCAA college basketball tournament at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, March 24, 2013. (AP Photo/Bill Feig)
The opening round of the women's NCAA tournament went true to form.
Stars Brittney Griner and Elena Delle Donne shined. The top seeds cruised. There was a thriller or two, just not too many upsets.
Unlike the bracket-busting that happened over the first four days of the men's tournament, the women's field remained stable. The higher seeds went 28-4, including blowout victories by No. 1 seeds Connecticut, Baylor, Notre Dame and Stanford.
"Maybe that's just because the committee seeds well," said Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer. "Maybe they really have a good handle on it."
It's hard to argue with that theory.
Over the past six seasons, only once has a team seeded 13 or lower been victorious in the tournament ? and that came last year when No. 13 Marist upset Georgia. There was the 1998 tournament in which No. 16 Harvard stunned No. 1 seed Stanford 71-67, but the 14s and 15s are a combined 0-152 since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1994.
There is no Florida Gulf Coast, which became the first men's team to reach the regional semifinals Sunday night. The women's talent pool isn't deep enough yet to see that sort of upset happen.
"I watch the men's games and I love it," said Baylor coach Kim Mulkey after her team beat Prairie View A&M by 42 points in its opener. "I don't compare. It's like comparing apples to oranges. The games are different. There's obviously more parity, more guys across the country that can play this game.
"There is more parity in the women's game, but you can't compare it to the men's game. There are so many guys who can flat out play, who can go to schools and can change programs."
Griner certainly has been a program-changer for Baylor. The 6-foot-8 senior, who is the second all-time leading scorer in NCAA history, had the 15th dunk of her career in the Lady Bears' easy victory.
Delaware needed a huge effort from Delle Donne to advance to the second round. The senior scored 33 points and led a second-half surge that carried the Blue Hens past West Virginia 66-53 on Sunday. Playing on their home floor before a sellout crowd, the sixth-seeded Blue Hens trailed 33-26 at halftime before bouncing back to extend their school-record winning streak to 26 games.
There were 4,532 fans in attendance, most of them clad in blue or yellow and cheering for Delaware. Not only were the parking lots jammed, but several people were pleading to purchase tickets from those waiting to enter the arena.
The Blue Hens did not disappoint.
"To win a game like this in front of our home crowd, which was electric, there's no other way to describe it other than I'm just totally thrilled for my players, this program, for the state of Delaware," coach Tina Martin said.
Ever since Delle Donne began playing at Delaware in 2009, interest in the program has soared. It reached its zenith Sunday in what might have been the most important basketball game played in the nation's first state.
"This was actually better than I could have even imagined," Delle Donne said. "Our fans were absolutely crazy. The atmosphere was amazing."
The game of the weekend though was in New York. Seventh-seeded Dayton outlasted St. John's 96-90 in double-overtime ? the first game in the NCAA tournament since 2000 that went that long.
"I'm going to enjoy this win," Dayton coach Jim Jabir said. "I'll be savoring this for a long time. It's one of the most complete games I've been a part of."
While St. John's fell short of pulling off the upset as a 10-seed, two other 10s did win. Creighton beat Syracuse and South Florida topped Texas Tech by one point in a thrilling game that no one saw the end of.
Viewers watching the final few minutes of the game on ESPN missed the end when the network's feed cut out. A fuse blew in the production truck, according to a statement put out by Texas Tech and the network.
Announcer Cara Capuano called the final 30 seconds over the phone. The feed finally came back after the final buzzer sounded, showing South Florida's cheerleaders celebrating the victory.
The only other lower seeds to win were ninth-ranked Iowa, which won on its home floor against Miami, and Kansas. The 12th-ranked Jayhawks won in Colorado. Despite the seeding, the Jayhawks weren't intimidated by the Buffaloes. After all the two schools had played many times when they were both members of the Big 12.
There is hope that the predictability of the tournament could end in the next round. In three of the past four seasons, at least one of the top eight teams hasn't advanced to the round of 16.
___
AP Sports Writers David Ginsburg in Newark, Del., and Janie McCauley in Stanford, Calif., contributed to this story.
___
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Mar. 24, 2013 ? Researchers have discovered that the extra chromosome inherited in Down syndrome impairs learning and memory because it leads to low levels of SNX27 protein in the brain.
What is it about the extra chromosome inherited in Down syndrome -- chromosome 21 -- that alters brain and body development? Researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) have new evidence that points to a protein called sorting nexin 27, or SNX27. SNX27 production is inhibited by a molecule encoded on chromosome 21. The study, published March 24 in Nature Medicine, shows that SNX27 is reduced in human Down syndrome brains. The extra copy of chromosome 21 means a person with Down syndrome produces less SNX27 protein, which in turn disrupts brain function. What's more, the researchers showed that restoring SNX27 in Down syndrome mice improves cognitive function and behavior.
"In the brain, SNX27 keeps certain receptors on the cell surface -- receptors that are necessary for neurons to fire properly," said Huaxi Xu, Ph.D., professor in Sanford-Burnham's Del E. Webb Neuroscience, Aging and Stem Cell Research Center and senior author of the study. "So, in Down syndrome, we believe lack of SNX27 is at least partly to blame for developmental and cognitive defects."
SNX27's role in brain function
Xu and colleagues started out working with mice that lack one copy of the snx27 gene. They noticed that the mice were mostly normal, but showed some significant defects in learning and memory. So the team dug deeper to determine why SNX27 would have that effect. They found that SNX27 helps keep glutamate receptors on the cell surface in neurons. Neurons need glutamate receptors in order to function correctly. With less SNX27, these mice had fewer active glutamate receptors and thus impaired learning and memory.
SNX27 levels are low in Down syndrome
Then the team got thinking about Down syndrome. The SNX27-deficient mice shared some characteristics with Down syndrome, so they took a look at human brains with the condition. This confirmed the clinical significance of their laboratory findings -- humans with Down syndrome have significantly lower levels of SNX27.
Next, Xu and colleagues wondered how Down syndrome and low SNX27 are connected -- could the extra chromosome 21 encode something that affects SNX27 levels? They suspected microRNAs, small pieces of genetic material that don't code for protein, but instead influence the production of other genes. It turns out that chromosome 21 encodes one particular microRNA called miR-155. In human Down syndrome brains, the increase in miR-155 levels correlates almost perfectly with the decrease in SNX27.
Xu and his team concluded that, due to the extra chromosome 21 copy, the brains of people with Down syndrome produce extra miR-155, which by indirect means decreases SNX27 levels, in turn decreasing surface glutamate receptors. Through this mechanism, learning, memory, and behavior are impaired.
Restoring SNX27 function rescues Down syndrome mice
If people with Down syndrome simply have too much miR-155 or not enough SNX27, could that be fixed? The team explored this possibility. They used a noninfectious virus as a delivery vehicle to introduce new human SNX27 in the brains of Down syndrome mice.
"Everything goes back to normal after SNX27 treatment. It's amazing -- first we see the glutamate receptors come back, then memory deficit is repaired in our Down syndrome mice," said Xin Wang, a graduate student in Xu's lab and first author of the study. "Gene therapy of this sort hasn't really panned out in humans, however. So we're now screening small molecules to look for some that might increase SNX27 production or function in the brain."
This research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Aging grants R01AG038710, R01AG021173, R01AG030197, R01AG044420; National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grants R01NS046673, P30NS076411; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development grant P01HD29587; National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant P01ES016738), Alzheimer's Association, American Health Assistance Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, 973 Prophase Project, Natural Science Funds for Distinguished Young Scholar of Fujian Province, Program for New Century Excellent Talents in Universities, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation.
The study was co-authored by Xin Wang, Sanford-Burnham; Yingjun Zhao, Sanford-Burnham and Xiamen University; Xiaofei Zhang, Sanford-Burnham; Hedieh Badie, Sanford-Burnham; Ying Zhou, Sanford-Burnham; Yangling Mu, Salk Institute; Li Shen Loo, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore; Lei Cai, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore; Robert C. Thompson, Sanford-Burnham; Bo Yang, Sanford-Burnham; Yaomin Chen, Sanford-Burnham; Peter F. Johnson, National Cancer Institute-Frederick; Chengbiao Wu, University of California, San Diego; Guojun Bu, Xiamen University; William C. Mobley, University of California, San Diego; Dongxian Zhang, Sanford-Burnham; Fred H. Gage, Salk Institute; Barbara Ranscht, Sanford-Burnham; Yun-wu Zhang, Sanford-Burnham and Xiamen University; Stuart A. Lipton, Sanford-Burnham and University of California, San Diego; Wanjin Hong, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore and Xiamen University; and Huaxi Xu, Sanford-Burnham and Xiamen University.
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