Russians Seek Clues and Count Blessings After Meteor Blast





CHEBARKUL, Russia —After a brilliant flash illuminated the sky on Friday morning like a second sun, Alyona V. Borchininova and several others in this run-down little town in the rust belt of western Siberian wandered outside, confused and curious.




They followed the light’s path to the town’s lakefront, where they trudged for about a mile over the open ice until they came to a startling sight: a perfectly round hole in the ice, about 20 feet in diameter, its rim glossy with fresh ice that had crusted on top of the snow.


“It was eerie,” Ms. Borchininova, a barmaid, said Saturday. “So we stood there. And then somebody joked, ‘Now the green men will crawl out and say hello.’ ”


Russians are still coming to terms with what NASA scientists say was a 7,000-ton chunk of space rock that came hurtling out of the sky at 40,000 miles an hour, exploding over the Ural Mountains, spraying debris for miles around and, amazingly, killing no one.


As the Russian government pursued the scientific mysteries of Friday’s exploding meteor by sending divers into the inky waters of the hole in Lake Chebarkul on Saturday, residents reacted with a kind of giddy relief and humor over their luck at having survived a cosmic near miss.


NASA estimates that when the meteor entered the atmosphere over Alaska, it weighed 7,000 to 10,000 tons and was at least 50 feet in diameter, a size that strikes the Earth about once every hundred years. They said it had exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT.


The shock wave injured hundreds of people about 54 miles away in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, most from broken glass; collapsed a wall in a zinc factory; set off car alarms; and sent dishes flying in thousands of apartments. Broken windows exposed people and pipes to the Siberian winter; many residents focused Saturday on boarding windows and draining pipes, to preserve heating systems.


If pieces of meteorite reached the surface, as NASA said was likely, they fell largely into the sea of birch and pine trees of Siberia, now blanketed in snow.


Lake Chebarkul is one of four sites the government believes to felt a significant impact, the minister of emergency situations, Vladimir Pushkov, told Interfax.


As the sun rose Saturday, the snow crystals sparkling in the sun like a million tiny mirrors, steam wafted from the site, apparently related to the work of divers, but the lake yielded little to shed light on the mystery.


Mr. Pushkov later said divers found nothing on the lake bed, but did not rule out meteor shrapnel as the cause of the hole.


“Experts are studying all possible places of impact,” he said. “We have no reports of confirmed discoveries.”


The discovery of a confirmed fragment could help scientists better apprehend the composition of the meteor, perhaps shedding light on how close it was to descending further before exploding from the heat, or of hitting the surface, potentially causing vastly more casualties in this region of military and industrial towns, a major nuclear research site and waste repository and other delicate infrastructure.


In Chelyabinsk, the worst hit town, most who had sought medical attention were released from hospitals by Saturday, the Ministry of Health reported. A total of 1,158 people, including 298 children, asked for medical assistance. Of these 52 people were hospitalized. By Saturday afternoon, 12 adults and three children remained in hospitals.


Health officials evacuated to Moscow a woman who broke two vertebrae after falling down a flight of stairs. One man’s finger was cut off by broken glass.


Overshadowing these misfortunes, a fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was being hailed as a hero for saving 44 children from glass cuts by ordering them to crawl under their desks after she saw the flash. Having no idea what it was, she executed a cold war-era duck-and-cover drill, with salutary results.


Ms. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated by glass that severed a tendon in her arm, Interfax reported; not one of her students suffered a cut.


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The Bachelor: Sean's Hometown Date with Desiree Gets Interrupted - By an Ex?




The ex who pops back into the picture has been a common storyline in recent seasons of The Bachelor. And this season is no exception.

In this exclusive preview of Monday night's episode, Sean Lowe meets more of Desiree Hartsock's loved ones than he bargained for.

"As Des and I are getting dinner ready for her parents, I feel like we're a couple," says Sean. "And I'm excited for her family to get here because I want to meet these people."

Instead, the ex shows up at the door, asking if he and Des can talk. An awkward, you've-got-to-wonder-if-it's-scripted dialogue ensues. A sampling:

Ex: Des, I love you, OK?

Sean: Whoa.

Ex: I've been texting, calling, where they hell have you been?

Des: [Gestures toward Sean] "I've been busy.

Ex: We're together for two years and all of a sudden, just nothing? I love you more than anything.

Sean: I'm thinking, 'Maybe I just need to leave.'

Ex: You're going to be with this actor? This isn't real.

Sean: First of all, I'm standing right here. You want to talk to me, talk to me ... [To Des]: Do you want to talk to him? [To Ex]: Then leave please.

Ex: Can you give us a minute?

Sean: Don't put your hands on me …

The fireworks air on the new episode of The Bachelor Monday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

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UN warns risk of hepatitis E in S. Sudan grows


GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region.


U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver.


Edwards said Friday that the camps have been hit by 6,017 cases of hepatitis E, which is spread through contaminated food and water.


He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.


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G20 steps back from currency brink, heat off Japan


MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Group of 20 nations declared on Saturday there would be no currency war and deferred plans to set new debt-cutting targets, underlining broad concern about the fragile state of the world economy.


Japan's expansive policies, which have driven down the yen, escaped direct criticism in a statement thrashed out in Moscow by policymakers from the G20, which spans developed and emerging markets and accounts for 90 percent of the world economy.


Analysts said the yen, which has dropped 20 percent as a result of aggressive monetary and fiscal policies to reflate the Japanese economy, may now continue to fall.


"The market will take the G20 statement as an approval for what it has been doing -- selling of the yen," said Neil Mellor, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London. "No censure of Japan means they will be off to the money printing presses."


After late-night talks, finance ministers and central bankers agreed on wording closer than expected to a joint statement issued last Tuesday by the Group of Seven rich nations backing market-determined exchange rates.


A draft communiqué on Friday had steered clear of the G7's call for economic policy not to be targeted at exchange rates. But the final version included a G20 commitment to refrain from competitive devaluations and stated monetary policy would be directed only at price stability and growth.


"The mood quite clearly early on was that we needed desperately to avoid protectionist measures ... that mood permeated quite quickly," Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters, adding that the wording of the G20 statement had been hardened up by the ministers.


As a result, it reflected a substantial, but not complete, endorsement of Tuesday's proclamation by the G7 nations - the United States, Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.


As with the G7 intervention, Tokyo said it gave it a green light to pursue its policies unchecked.


"I have explained that (Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe's administration is doing its utmost to escape from deflation and we have gained a certain understanding," Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters.


"We're confident that if Japan revives its own economy that would certainly affect the world economy as well. We gained understanding on this point."


Flaherty admitted it would be difficult to gauge if domestic policies were aimed at weakening currencies or not.


NO FISCAL TARGETS


The G20 also made a commitment to a credible medium-term fiscal strategy, but stopped short of setting specific goals as most delegations felt any economic recovery was too fragile.


The communiqué said risks to the world economy had receded but growth remained too weak and unemployment too high.


"A sustained effort is required to continue building a stronger economic and monetary union in the euro area and to resolve uncertainties related to the fiscal situation in the United States and Japan, as well as to boost domestic sources of growth in surplus economies," it said.


A debt-cutting pact struck in Toronto in 2010 will expire this year if leaders fail to agree to extend it at a G20 summit of leaders in St Petersburg in September.


The United States says it is on track to meet its Toronto pledge but argues that the pace of future fiscal consolidation must not snuff out demand. Germany and others are pressing for another round of binding debt targets.


"We had a broad consensus in the G20 that we will stick to the commitment to fulfill the Toronto goals," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said. "We do not have any interest in U.S.-bashing ... In St. Petersburg follow-up-goals will be decided."


The G20 put together a huge financial backstop to halt a market meltdown in 2009 but has failed to reach those heights since. At successive meetings, Germany has pressed the United States and others to do more to tackle their debts. Washington in turn has urged Berlin to do more to increase demand.


Backing in the communiqué for the use of domestic monetary policy to support economic recovery reflected the U.S. Federal Reserve's commitment to monetary stimulus through quantitative easing, or QE, to promote recovery and jobs.


QE entails large-scale bond buying -- $85 billion a month in the Fed's case -- that helps economic growth but has also unleashed destabilising capital flows into emerging markets.


A commitment to minimize such "negative spillovers" was an offsetting point in the text that China, fearful of asset bubbles and lost export competitiveness, highlighted.


"Major developed nations (should) pay attention to their monetary policy spillover," Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying in Moscow.


Russia, this year's chair of the G20, admitted the group had failed to reach agreement on medium-term budget deficit levels and expressed concern about ultra-loose policies that it and other emerging economies say could store up trouble for later.


On currencies, the G20 text reiterated its commitment last November, "to move more rapidly toward mores market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying fundamentals, and avoid persistent exchange rate misalignments".


It said disorderly exchange rate movements and excess volatility in financial flows could harm economic and financial stability.


(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller, Lesley Wroughton, Maya Dyakina, Tetsushi Kajimoto, Jan Strupczewski, Lidia Kelly, Katya Golubkova, Jason Bush, Anirban Nag and Michael Martina. Writing by Douglas Busvine. Editing by Timothy Heritage/Mike Peacock)



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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 15

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Gretchen Rossi: Is She Wearing an Engagement Ring?






Buzz








02/15/2013 at 12:40 PM EST







Gretchen Rossi and Slade Smiley


FayesVision/WENN


Slade Smiley hasn't put a ring on it – yet.

The reality TV personality's longtime girlfriend, Real Housewives of Orange County star Gretchen Rossi, was spotted at Heather McDonald's book launch at Hollywood's Emerson Theater on Wednesday night, sporting some bling on her engagement finger.

But apparently Smiley hasn't popped the question.

"The ring was not from Slade," a source tells PEOPLE, while a second source says when asked about the ring at the event, "Slade danced around the question."

About two years ago, Rossi, 34, told PEOPLE she was in no rush to head to the altar with Smiley.

"When I first got married, I thought I was going to be married for life," she said. "I thought that was it and it was really hard to fail at that marriage."

But now, although the ring wasn't from him, the first source tells PEOPLE, "They're planning on getting engaged pretty soon."

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Study: Fish in drug-tainted water suffer reaction


BOSTON (AP) — What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.


It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.


The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.


"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.


Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places.


"We know that in a predator-prey relation, increased boldness and activity combined with decreased sociality ... means you're going to be somebody's lunch quite soon," said Gregory Moller, a toxicologist at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. "It removes the natural balance."


Researchers around the world have been taking a close look at the effects of pharmaceuticals in extremely low concentrations, measured in parts per billion. Such drugs have turned up in waterways in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere over the past decade.


They come mostly from humans and farm animals; the drugs pass through their bodies in unmetabolized form. These drug traces are then piped to water treatment plants, which are not designed to remove them from the cleaned water that flows back into streams and rivers.


The Associated Press first reported in 2008 that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans carries low concentrations of many common drugs. The findings were based on questionnaires sent to water utilities, which reported the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and other drugs.


The news reports led to congressional hearings and legislation, more water testing and more public disclosure. To this day, though, there are no mandatory U.S. limits on pharmaceuticals in waterways.


The research team at Sweden's Umea University used minute concentrations of 2 parts per billion of the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam, similar to concentrations found in real waters. The drug belongs to a widely used class of medicines known as benzodiazepines that includes Valium and Librium.


The team put young wild European perch into an aquarium, exposed them to these highly diluted drugs and then carefully measured feeding, schooling, movement and hiding behavior. They found that drug-exposed fish moved more, fed more aggressively, hid less and tended to school less than unexposed fish. On average, the drugged fish were more than twice as active as the others, researcher Micael Jonsson said. The effects were more pronounced at higher drug concentrations.


"Our first thought is, this is like a person diagnosed with ADHD," said Jonsson, referring to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "They become asocial and more active than they should be."


Tomas Brodin, another member of the research team, called the drug's environmental impact a global problem. "We find these concentrations or close to them all over the world, and it's quite possible or even probable that these behavioral effects are taking place as we speak," he said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.


Most previous research on trace drugs and marine life has focused on biological changes, such as male fish that take on female characteristics. However, a 2009 study found that tiny concentrations of antidepressants made fathead minnows more vulnerable to predators.


It is not clear exactly how long-term drug exposure, beyond the seven days in this study, would affect real fish in real rivers and streams. The Swedish researchers argue that the drug-induced changes could jeopardize populations of this sport and commercial fish, which lives in both fresh and brackish water.


Water toxins specialist Anne McElroy of Stony Brook University in New York agreed: "These lower chronic exposures that may alter things like animals' mating behavior or its ability to catch food or its ability to avoid being eaten — over time, that could really affect a population."


Another possibility, the researchers said, is that more aggressive feeding by the perch on zooplankton could reduce the numbers of these tiny creatures. Since zooplankton feed on algae, a drop in their numbers could allow algae to grow unchecked. That, in turn, could choke other marine life.


The Swedish team said it is highly unlikely people would be harmed by eating such drug-exposed fish. Jonsson said a person would have to eat 4 tons of perch to consume the equivalent of a single pill.


Researchers said more work is needed to develop better ways of removing drugs from water at treatment plants. They also said unused drugs should be brought to take-back programs where they exist, instead of being flushed down the toilet. And they called on pharmaceutical companies to work on "greener" drugs that degrade more easily.


Sandoz, one of three companies approved to sell oxazepam in the U.S., "shares society's desire to protect the environment and takes steps to minimize the environmental impact of its products over their life cycle," spokeswoman Julie Masow said in an emailed statement. She provided no details.


___


Online:


Overview of the drug: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682050.html


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Wall Street flat after data, S&P on pace for seventh weekly gain

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks were little changed on Friday and the S&P 500 remained on track for a seventh week of gains after upbeat consumer sentiment data, as equities continued a phase of consolidation after a strong start to the year.


The S&P 500, up nearly 7 percent so far this year, is facing strong technical resistance near the 1,525 level. But investors, expecting the index to advance further in the quarter, have held back from locking in profits.


"The market has run awfully hard on a year-to-date basis and certainly some consolidation, a couple of percentage points of pullback, is probably at hand, probably healthy and is probably where we are," said Jim Russell, senior equity strategist for U.S. Bank Wealth Management in Cincinnati.


Data released Friday illustrated the bumpy road the U.S. economic recovery continues to take.


The New York Federal Reserve said manufacturing in New York state expanded for the first time in seven months, while Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's preliminary reading of consumer sentiment rose from the prior month and beat expectations.


But data also showed U.S. manufacturing fell in January after a rise in the prior month.


"We are at a point where the macro news will continue to be a two-steps forward, one-step back kind of progression, with most of the news showing a firmness, but an occasional data point that will represent a step back," Russell said.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> added 5.07 points, or 0.04 percent, to 13,978.46. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> shed 0.20 points, or 0.01 percent, to 1,521.18. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> gained 1.02 points, or 0.03 percent, to 3,199.68.


The benchmark S&P 500 is on track to register its seventh straight week of gains by the close of trading Friday, a feat not seen since a run of consecutive weekly gains between December 2010 and January 2011.


A surge in merger and acquisition activity, with more than $158 billion in deals announced so far in 2013, has given further support to the equity market as it points to healthy valuations and bets on the economic outlook.


Herbalife shares jumped 13.1 percent to $42.27 a day after billionaire investor Carl Icahn said in a regulatory filing that he now owns 13 percent of Herbalife and was ready to put it in play.


MeadWestvaco Corp climbed 10.6 percent to $35.04 as the biggest percentage gainer on the S&P index after activist investor Nelson Peltz's Trian Fund Management LP said in an SEC filing it had bought about 1.6 million shares of the packaging company.


Burger King Worldwide shares gained 2.4 percent to $16.98 after it beat estimates with a 94 percent rise in fourth-quarter profit, thanks to new menu additions.


Oil service stocks declined, weighed by a 5.8 percent drop in shares of Transocean to $55.89, after the rig contractor reported its fleet update and Deutsche Bank cut its rating on the stock to "sell." The PHLX oil service sector <.osx> lost 1.9 percent.


(Editing by Bernadette Baum)



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Way of the World: Technology, Trade and Fewer Jobs







NEW YORK — President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech this week confirmed it: The pre-eminent political and economic challenge in the industrialized democracies is how to make capitalism work for the middle class.




There is nothing mysterious about that. The most important fact about the United States in this century is that middle-class incomes are stagnating. The financial crisis has revealed an equally stark structural problem in much of Europe.


Even in a relatively prosperous age — for all of today’s woes, we have left behind the dark, satanic mills and workhouses of the 19th century — this decline of the middle class is more than an economic issue. It is also a political one. The main point of democracy is to deliver positive results for the majority.


All of which is why understanding what is happening to the middle class is urgently important. There is no better place to start than by talking to David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Autor is one of the leading students of the most striking trend bedeviling the middle class: the polarization of the job market. That is a nice way of saying the economy is being cleaved into high-paying jobs at the top and low-paying jobs at the bottom, while the middle-skill and middle-wage jobs that used to form society’s backbone are being hollowed out.


But when I asked him this week what had gone wrong for the U.S. middle class, he gave a different answer: “The main problem is we’ve just had a decade of incredibly anemic employment growth. All of a sudden, around 2000 and 2001, things just slowed down.”


Academics can usually be counted on to have a confident explanation for everything. That is why I was surprised and impressed by Mr. Autor’s answer when I asked him where the jobs had gone. “No one really understands why that is the case,” he said.


It was a winningly modest reply. But work by Mr. Autor and two colleagues — David Dorn, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego — is starting to untangle the two forces that both the conventional wisdom and the academy agree are probably responsible for a lot of what is happening to the middle class.


Those forces are technological change and trade. The easy assumption is that the two go together. After all, trade needs technology — it is hard to imagine outsourcing without the Internet, sophisticated logistics systems and jet travel. Technology is dependent on trade, too: The opportunity for global scale is one reason technological innovation has yielded such outsize rewards.


But in a careful study of local labor markets in the United States, Mr. Autor, Mr. Dorn and Mr. Hanson have found that trade and technology had very different consequences for jobs.


“We were surprised at how distinct the two were,” Mr. Autor said. “We found that the trade shock had a very measurable impact on the employment rate. Technology led to job polarization, but its employment effect was minimal.” Trade, at least in the short term, really did ship jobs overseas. Technology did not kill jobs per se, but it did hollow out those essential jobs in the middle.


The big surprise, at least for believers (like me) in the classic liberal economic view that trade benefits both parties, is the strong and negative impact of globalization on U.S. workers — Mr. Autor estimates it accounts for 15 to 20 percent of jobs lost.


“The rise of China was such a huge change. It really did matter,” Mr. Autor said. “First, China is such a huge country. Two, China was 40 or 50 years behind in technology, so it had a lot of catching up to do. Third, it happened so fast.”


What is striking, and frightening, is the extent to which, at least in the U.S.-China trade relationship, the knee-jerk, populist fears intellectuals tend to deride actually turned out to be true.


“U.S.-China trade is almost a one-way street. This trade relationship doesn’t clearly give you the benefit that you can sell a lot of stuff to your trade partner,” Mr. Dorn said. “If you talk to someone who is somehow involved in the promotion of free trade, they may say that maybe the headquarters of Apple benefits. That may be true. But the first-order effect is of job loss.”


The impact of technology is more familiar. Mr. Autor, Mr. Dorn and Mr. Hanson found that it did not create fewer jobs overall, but it did hollow out the jobs in the middle.


“Technology has really changed the distribution of occupation. That doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with reduced unemployment, but it creates a more bimodal set of opportunities,” Mr. Autor said. “There is an abundance of work to do in food service and there is an abundance of work in finance, but there are fewer middle-wage, middle-income jobs.”


What is challenging about both of these trends, and what makes the hollowing out of the middle class a political problem as well as an economic one, is how different they look depending on whether you own a company or work for one.


Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss. That profound difference is why politics in the rich democracies are so polarized right now. Capitalism and democracy are at cross-purposes, and no one yet has a clear plan for reconciling them.


Chrystia Freeland is editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.


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Has Miley Cyrus Chosen Her Wedding Dress Designer?







Style News Now





02/14/2013 at 12:00 PM ET











Miley Cyrus Marchesa Fashion Week
Christopher Polk/Getty


Until now, Miley Cyrus has been fairly tight-lipped about her impending nuptials to fiancé Liam Hemsworth, but it seems she’s ready to dish about the part we most care about: her bridal gown.


“[Marchesa] is definitely one of our options,” Cyrus told PEOPLE at the Marchesa fashion show in N.Y.C. on Monday. “[They're] amazing.”


If Cyrus does walk down the aisle in Marchesa, she certainly wouldn’t be the first celebrity to do so: Blake Lively, Nicole Richie, Petra Nemcova and Molly Sims all wore custom gowns from the romantic, feminine line for their weddings.


But don’t start collecting from your Miley Cyrus Wedding Dress Pool just yet; it’s hardly a done deal: “I have so many options of different people who want to be involved in it,” she said. “I’ll probably have 30 [dresses]!”


Tell us: Who do you hope designs Cyrus’s wedding dress?


–Jennifer Cress, reporting by Catherine Kast


PHOTOS: SEE MORE STAR STYLE!




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