Finnish presidential election headed for runoff (AP)

HELSINKI ? Finns trudged through thick snow and braved blizzards to vote for a new president on Sunday as polls indicated declining support for the front-runner, making a second round next month increasingly likely.

Ex-finance minister Sauli Niinisto holds a clear lead in a field of eight candidates but surveys indicate he will not capture the required majority to win the first round.

The vote comes as the Nordic country braces for cutbacks amid a European financial crisis that threatens the economy and the top credit rating of the eurozone member.

Finland's 12th president since independence from Russia in 1917 will replace Tarja Halonen, the country's hugely popular first female head of state who has served two six-year terms.

The president has a largely ceremonial role and is not involved in daily politics, but is considered an important shaper of public opinion in the nation of 5.3 million on the fringes of northeastern Europe.

The 63-year-old Niinisto, considered debonair in a country not known for social graces, said that if elected he would have a duty to ensure the government's expected belt-tightening measures will be evenly spread among the population.

The president has a largely ceremonial role and is not involved in daily politics, but is considered an important shaper of public opinion in the small Nordic country.

"We need a president just as some people need kings and queens. Somebody has to be the figurehead," said Laila Halme, a retired graphic artist, as she walked her dog through thick snow to vote in a Helsinki suburb.

Among those challenging Niinisto is Timo Soini, the stocky, plain-talking populist leader who has become the face of Finland's growing doubts about the euro. His Finns party made stunning gains to win 19 percent of votes in parliamentary elections last year, sending shockwaves through Europe with demands that relatively well-off Finland stop supporting bailouts for debt-stricken eurozone members.

Soini and centrist former foreign minister Paavo Vayrynen, who also opposes Finland's membership in the 17-nation eurozone, had been tying for second place, but a recent poll indicates that Pekka Haavisto, a pro-EU Greens candidate has overtaken them.

Halme said she will vote for Haavisto, the 53-year-old former environment minister, who has held several positions in EU and U.N. operations helping to solve crises in Sudan, Darfur and the Middle East.

"He's extremely cultured and civilized. We need a member of a new, educated generation who hasn't been corrupted by politics," she said.

Pirjo Halinen, a 30-year-old nurse, said her vote will go Niinisto, a former vice president in the European Investment Bank who was Finland's finance minister when it joined the euro in 2002, but said she was glad Haavisto might be in a runoff against him on Feb. 5.

"Now, we have two internationally minded candidates in the lead. That sends a message to Europe and the world," Halinen said, echoing the sentiments of many in a nation acutely aware of its image.

An opinion poll published Thursday showed Niinisto still in the lead, but down eight points from a previous survey, to 29 percent support. Haavisto had 12 percent, while Vayrynen, who tied with Haavisto in previous surveys, was given 10 percent support.

Soini had fallen one point to 6 percent, in the survey published by national broadcaster YLE. The poll gave the four other candidates each 2-6 percent. Pollster Taloustutkimus interviewed 1,457 people between Jan. 10 and 18. It had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120122/ap_on_re_eu/eu_finland_presidential_election

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Nikki Haley Fails To Deliver Home County For Mitt Romney

Mauldin Patch:

Not only could Haley not deliver South Carolina for the candidate she backed, she also couldn't deliver her county or even her home precinct. The latter two went to Newt Gingrich.

"Nikki Haley couldn't even deliver her home county for Mitt Romney," said Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist.

"She told Romney her endorsement would deliver South Carolina, but in reality it looks like she delivered four more years for Barack Obama. Nikki Haley is the best thing that ever happened to the South Carolina Democratic Party."

Read the whole story: Mauldin Patch

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/22/nikki-haley-romney_n_1221682.html

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Morgan Stanley's loss is narrower than expected (AP)

NEW YORK ? Morgan Stanley posted a fourth-quarter loss of $275 million Thursday, its first since early 2009, dragged down by the cost of a settlement over soured mortgage securities.

But the loss was far smaller than investors were expecting, and the company's stock rose over 5 percent. Morgan Stanley's loss was equivalent to 15 cents per share, versus the 43 cents analysts were predicting, according to FactSet.

The loss stemmed from Morgan Stanley's settlement last month with insurance company MBIA, an agreement that slashed earnings by 59 cents per share. MBIA had accused Morgan Stanley of being misleading about the quality of commercial mortgage-backed securities for which it bought insurance.

Morgan Stanley and other banks accused the insurer of restructuring itself to avoid paying the banks' claims. While the settlement took a deep hit on quarterly results, Morgan Stanley portrayed it as one of its final steps in cleaning up problems dating from the financial crisis.

"For the first time in two years, our to-do list is not our problem list," CEO James Gorman said in a call with analysts.

Glenn Schorr, an analyst at Nomura Equity Research, said that Morgan Stanley's earnings were better than expected, excluding the MBIA-related loss, and its stock trading fell less than at other banks. Overall, Schorr said, Morgan Stanley is "making progress cleaning up legacy issues" but "is still a work in progress."

Like its peers, Morgan Stanley has been trimming expenses and cutting jobs as the economy continues to struggle. It shed about 700 employees last year, or about 1 percent of its workforce, bringing its total down to about 61,900 at year's end, and more jobs cuts are on the way.

The bank says it is examining expenses rigorously, cutting back on travel and looking at all costs, from Bloomberg terminals to consultants. It's also considering restructuring plans that could include outsourcing some technology functions or consolidating legal units.

Even so, the average compensation Morgan Stanley paid for the year was $265,000, up from about $255,000 the year before. The bank said this was related to its transition to defer bigger portions of some workers' bonuses.

The bank has also capped the amount that workers can get in their bonus immediately: Anything over $125,000 will be deferred.

Morgan Stanley's main rival, Goldman Sachs, made even deeper cuts, slashing its work force 7 percent and its compensation 21 percent. That pushed Goldman's stock up 7 percent on Wednesday, even though it also announced a 30 percent drop in quarterly revenue.

Morgan Stanley is also figuring out how to redefine itself as new government regulations crimp former sources of revenue, including certain complicated investment vehicles. New rules will also require banks to hold more capital.

Revenue fell 26 percent from a year ago to $5.7 billion. The institutional securities unit, which helps clients with investment banking services like packaging securities and raising capital, reported a 42 percent decline in revenue.

Though investment banking is always volatile, the risks are more pronounced at Morgan Stanley. Unlike some of its rivals, like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., Morgan Stanley doesn't have a large consumer deposit base to rely on when its investment bank stumbles. Some customers, the bank said, held off on deal-making over the year because of turbulence in financial markets brought on by Europe's debt crisis.

Porat said on the conference call that uncertainty about Europe was a "big cloud" over earnings growth. However, Gorman added that he didn't buy into the "hysteria" around concerns over European countries' debt obligations.

"Europe is more likely than not to resolve itself," Gorman said, though he added it would require "a couple of years, not a couple of weeks."

Gorman, who became CEO two years ago, has been slimming down the bank, selling off units like a mortgage servicing division and an asset management business. He's been emphasizing divisions like wealth management, which provide smaller returns than some investment banking operations used to but also carry a lot less risk because they're based on fees rather than markets.

Despite those efforts, Morgan Stanley's wealth management unit struggled in the quarter. Revenue fell 3 percent and profit fell 20 percent for the unit, which offers financial planning for wealthy individuals and small to medium-sized businesses. Asset management, which manages investment portfolios, also reported lower revenue and profits, thanks in part to souring investments in real estate.

Morgan Stanley's stock jumped 5.4 percent Thursday to close at $18.28.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/personalfinance/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120119/ap_on_bi_ge/us_earns_morgan_stanley

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Better mathematics boosts image-processing algorithm

The Fourier transform, which splits a complicated signal into individual pure frequencies, was devised over 200 years ago but only became widely used after the development of an algorithm called the fast Fourier transform in the 1960s. Now, computer scientist Dina Katabi and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a Fourier transform algorithm that is potentially hundreds of times faster still.

Splitting a signal using the Fourier transform reveals how much different frequency components contribute to an overall sound or image. In some cases, a wide range of frequencies contribute equally, but often a small number dominate. The MIT algorithm improves performance on signals of the latter type, known as sparse signals.

"Many natural signals have a sparse nature," says Katabi, including images and sounds. By contrast, human transmissions such as Wi-Fi signals tend to be non-sparse because they are designed to carry as much information as possible by making full use of available frequencies.

The team discovered they could quickly identify the important frequencies in a sparse signal by combining two existing signal filters to create a new, more efficient one. This filter works by dividing the range of frequencies into sets, then identifying which sets contain important frequencies.

Having found the key sets, the team had to identify the exact important frequency within each set. This is usually done by subdividing the set repeatedly until only the important signal remains.

Rapid sampling

However, the team applied another signal-processing technique normally used to improve wireless communications. This is based on the idea that the most important frequency will modulate all the other signals in the set. Sampling the set rapidly at different times reveals the frequency of this dominating signal. The new technique can process sparse signals up to 10,000 faster than the old algorithm.

Katabi and colleagues are now investigating how their algorithm could improve existing compression techniques, such as those used in smartphones to store video and audio. "You make an algorithm faster by doing fewer operations, and if the algorithm does fewer operations then it consumes less power," she says. So more efficient compression techniques could make your smartphone's battery last longer.

The team presented the work at the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in Kyoto, Japan, this week.

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Nick Cannon Focuses On Kids After Health Scare

'I love everything that they do and just want to be a part of everything,' Cannon tells MTV News.
By Nadeska Alexis

Nick Cannon
Photo: MTV News

During his recent hospital stay for treatment of kidney failure, Nick Cannon got plenty of support from his wife, Mariah Carey — he referred to her as his "angel" during our interview — but his twins Moroccan and Monroe were also a key part of the entertainer's decision to adapt a healthier lifestyle. During his first day back at the office on Tuesday, Cannon told MTV News that his health scare intensified the way he feels about his family.

"Right now my kids are everything — they're always going to be everything, but when something like this happens to you, everything else is shut out and you're just focused on them," he said. "So every second you just notice so many things ... it just makes it so much more poignant. I love everything that they do and just want to be a part of everything."

Cannon, who has temporarily adapted a strict renal diet, said that his time in the hospital made all of the important things very clear. "There's a second where you're thinking, 'What if I'm not able to instill the things I want to instill into my children?' It just makes you think, like, 'I need to give them everything I could possibly give them right now,' and obviously it starts with love."

The radio and stand-up comedy host was hospitalized during a vacation with his family in Aspen, Colorado, after experiencing severe pains in his lower back. Doctors initially suspected kidney stones as the culprit, before more tests showed that his kidneys were shutting down due to an overdose of protein, medication he was taking and a lack of proper sustenance.

"I always considered myself as someone who was in great shape, but I was doing too much [to my body] so my immune system got confused and just started attacking my kidneys," Cannon told MTV News. "You look at my Twitter picture and I look like I'm in shape, but I was putting the wrong stuff into my body, speeding all the time, not sleeping and eating properly. It's all about taking time and really caring about yourself and how you fuel yourself."

Related Artists

• Nick Cannon

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1677445/nick-cannon-health-scare.jhtml

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Novel strategy improves cancer cell uptake of nanoparticles

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Posted: Jan 19th, 2012

Novel strategy improves cancer cell uptake of nanoparticles

(Nanowerk News) One of the promises of using nanoparticles to deliver potent anticancer agents to tumors is that it is easy to coat nanoparticles with tumor-targeting molecules that should increase the amount of drug that reaches a tumor while decreasing the amount of drug that hits healthy tissue. Taking this idea one step further, researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a strategy for identifying what could be called tumor uptake molecules for use on nanoparticles. This new class of tumor-targeting agents boosts the amount of drug-loaded nanoparticles that get into cancer cells.

Omid Farokhzad and Robert Langer, both members of the MIT-Harvard Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE), led this study. The researchers published their findings in the journal ACS Nano ("Engineering of Targeted Nanoparticles for Cancer Therapy Using Internalizing Aptamers Isolated by Cell-Uptake Selection").

The MIT-Harvard CCNE team focused their discovery efforts on molecules known as aptamers, which are small pieces of RNA or DNA that form three-dimensional shapes capable of binding tightly and specifically to designated targets. In most instances, aptamers are constructed to target a known biomolecule?a disease-associated protein, for example. In this case, the investigators took a different approach and instead targeted two biological properties?the ability to distinguish a prostate cancer cell from a normal prostate cell and the ability to get into the diseased cells. They performed this feat by starting with a huge pool of random RNA sequences and through an iterative process gradually enriched this pool for RNAs that targeted and entered prostate cancer cells. After 12 cycles of this enrichment process, the investigators identified a small number of aptamers that each displayed superior tumor targeting and uptake properties.

The researchers chose one of these aptamers and linked it to a polymer nanoparticle loaded with docetaxel, a potent anticancer agent. Experiments have so far shown that this construct has no effect on normal cells but is highly toxic to prostate cancer cells. The investigators are planning further studies in animal models of prostate cancer. They note that this approach is easily modified to finding targeting and uptake aptamers for any type of cancer cell.

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Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=24007.php

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More Than Half of Teens Who Gave Birth Weren't Using Contraception: CDC (HealthDay)

THURSDAY, Jan. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Slightly more than half of U.S. teenaged girls who had a child between 2004 and 2008 did not use birth control, and a third didn't think they could get pregnant at the time, a new government study finds.

Although the number of teens who get pregnant in the United States has fallen in recent years, the U.S. teen birth rate is still the highest of any developed country, with more than 400,000 births in 2009, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"These are the girls who had risky sex and ended up getting pregnant and giving birth," said study co-author Lorrie Gavin, a health scientist with the CDC's Division of Reproductive Health. "This is the group that we should pay most attention to, because they're the ones who experienced unintended births."

According to the report, 50.1 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 who had an unintended pregnancy were not using any form of contraception when they got pregnant, and 31.4 percent thought they could not get pregnant at the time.

Commenting on the findings, Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute in New York City, had this to say: "The fact that they found such a low level of contraceptive use says a number of things about what we need to do to try to improve adolescent reproductive health."

Finer said more teens should be using IUDs and implants because they take the decision-making out of the equation.

"In the past, these methods have been seen as ones for older women, but those methods should be considered first-line methods for adolescents and young adults," Finer suggested. "Historically, it's been condom and pill for young people, but we need to expand our thinking on that."

The girls who didn't think they could get pregnant have misconceptions about pregnancy, Finer added. "That clearly reflects on education and awareness," he said.

The reason some girls think that they can't get pregnant is probably a combination of factors, Finer explained.

"The risk of becoming pregnant from one act of sex is relatively small," he noted. "It may be the case that, for some teens, they had unprotected sex and didn't become pregnant so then they think they won't become pregnant based on their past experience," he said.

"This is a lack of recognition that if you don't get pregnant one time you may get pregnant at another time," Finer pointed out. In addition, some girls may think that either they or their partner is infertile.

Finer said more education about pregnancy and contraception is needed.

Another co-author of report pointed out other scenarios that might explain why these teens did not use contraception.

"Other reasons for not using contraception were their partner did not want to use it, or because they didn't mind getting pregnant," said Ayanna T. Harrison, who is also with the Division of Reproductive Health.

Among teens who got pregnant despite saying they used birth control, 24 percent said they used condoms and 21 percent said they used an IUD, implant or a birth control pill, said Harrison.

"When we looked at age, race and ethnicity, we didn't see a huge difference," Harrison said. However, among those who thought they couldn't get pregnant, 42 percent were Hispanic compared to almost 27 percent of white teens and 32 percent of black teens, she said.

Gavin added that most were not using the most effective methods of birth control, such as IUDs.

"They were using methods that require some kind of ongoing behavior, such as taking a pill every day or using a condom every time you have sex," she said. "We know that consistent use of the pill or a condom is a major problem."

Efforts are needed to dispel myths about becoming pregnant and to increase motivation to avoid pregnancy, Gavin said.

"We need to do a better job for sexually active teens," Gavin said, including providing better access to contraception, encouraging the use of more effective methods and increasing the motivation to use birth control consistently.

"Teen pregnancy is a public health concern because teen mothers are more likely to experience negative social outcomes, and infants of teen mothers have higher risks for preterm birth, low birth weight and related complications," the authors wrote.

The report was published in the Jan. 20 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

More information

For more on teen pregnancy, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/parenting/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20120119/hl_hsn/morethanhalfofteenswhogavebirthwerentusingcontraceptioncdc

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