Russian Ethics Official Steps Aside Over Property Disclosures

MOSCOW — The chairman of the ethics committee in Russia’s lower house of Parliament temporarily relinquished his authority on Wednesday after bloggers posted a raft of documents on the Internet showing him as the owner of expensive real estate, including a luxury oceanfront apartment in South Beach, part of Miami Beach, as well as valuable property in Russia that he did not list on required disclosure forms.

The chairman, Vladimir A. Pekhtin, insisted in a televised statement that he had done nothing wrong, and that his voluntary surrender of authority over the ethics panel would last only for the duration of an investigation that he said would clear him.

But the documents, some of them easily available public property records, showed Mr. Pekhtin’s name on the deeds of at least three properties in Florida, including the South Beach apartment bought last year for nearly $1.3 million in a building where Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, also owns a unit.

Mr. Pekhtin’s official income and property declaration form, posted on Parliament’s Web site, lists no property outside of Russia.

The disclosure of his real estate holdings and the allegations that he failed to properly disclose his assets came just a day after President Vladimir V. Putin proposed legislation that would bar senior Russian officials from holding bank accounts or owning stocks outside the country.

While neither Mr. Putin’s proposal nor any existing law prohibits officials from owning real estate overseas, the disclosure of Mr. Pekhtin’s holdings provided powerful ammunition for critics of Mr. Putin and of United Russia, the party that controls Parliament.

The anticorruption blogger and political opposition leader Aleksei Navalny posted copies of property records and photographs, along with a narrative dripping with sarcasm.

United Russia could entrust Parliament’s ethics committee “only to the most honest, decent and ethical member of the State Duma,” he wrote. “Otherwise, if it turns out this person is not tactful and ethical, it would be embarrassing.”

He noted that another lawmaker, Sergei Zheleznyak, had voiced strong nationalist views and demanded an end to foreign influences in Russia, only to have pictures emerge recently of his children who live and study abroad. Russian bloggers and news organizations were apparently tipped off about the property by someone calling himself Doctor Z, whom the business newspaper Vedmosti described as a researcher living in Spain.

In appearances on Russian television, Mr. Pekhtin said that the property abroad belonged to his son, Aleksei, who lived and worked in the United States.

“I do not have any property abroad,” he said. “There is property belonging to my son.”

In October, Vedmosti reported that Mr. Pekhtin and his wife owned a huge mansion outside St. Petersburg and several other properties near the Bay of Finland, but had disclosed owning only the land and not any buildings on it.

Other records showed that the Pekhtins had bought a number of properties in an area where the government planned to build a new roadway, essentially guaranteeing them cash compensation.

In his statement on television, Mr. Pekhtin said he reserved the right to defend himself in court if necessary.  

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Kate Upton and the Models of Sports Illustrated Party in Las Vegas

02/13/2013 at 10:10 PM EST

Who wouldn't want to party with the models of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue?

The last few days have led up to what is considered the biggest event in the history of the celebrated franchise.

Following the reveal of the 2013 cover girl, Kate Upton (again!), the sexy bikini-clad ladies are heading to Las Vegas to party ... in a big way.

And you're invited!

Watch live from Sin City, starting at 10:15 p.m. ET, as Caesar's Palace is lit up in honor of the Swimsuit Issue. The models – including Upton, Chrissy Teigen, Anne V and countless others – will be there, walking the red carpet and attending a VIP party.

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Clues to why most survived China melamine scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists wondering why some children and not others survived one of China's worst food safety scandals have uncovered a suspect: germs that live in the gut.

In 2008, at least six babies died and 300,000 became sick after being fed infant formula that had been deliberately and illegally tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. There were some lingering puzzles: How did it cause kidney failure, and why wasn't everyone equally at risk?

A team of researchers from the U.S. and China re-examined those questions in a series of studies in rats. In findings released Wednesday, they reported that certain intestinal bacteria play a crucial role in how the body handles melamine.

The intestines of all mammals teem with different species of bacteria that perform different jobs. To see if one of those activities involves processing melamine, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Shanghai Jiao Tong University gave lab rats antibiotics to kill off some of the germs — and then fed them melamine.

The antibiotic-treated rats excreted twice as much of the melamine as rats that didn't get antibiotics, and they experienced fewer kidney stones and other damage.

A closer look identified why: A particular intestinal germ — named Klebsiella terrigena — was metabolizing melamine to create a more toxic byproduct, the team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Previous studies have estimated that fewer than 1 percent of healthy people harbor that bacteria species. A similar fraction of melamine-exposed children in China got sick, the researchers wrote. But proving that link would require studying stool samples preserved from affected children, they cautioned.

Still, the research is pretty strong, said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the new study.

More importantly, "this paper adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that microbes in the body play a significant role in our response to toxicity and in our health in general," Gilbert said.

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Wall Street pauses after rally to five-year high

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks drifted in light volume on Wednesday, ending little changed, as investors remained cautious after the S&P 500 index briefly hit its highest intraday level since November 2007.

The S&P 500 was buoyed by General Electric after cable company Comcast Corp said it will buy from GE the the part of NBCUniversal it didn't already own for $16.7 billion.

Comcast's stock hit the highest since 1999 before closing up 3 percent at $40.13 and GE gained 3.6 percent to $23.39.

The S&P 500 is up 6.6 percent so far this year, partly due to stronger-than-expected corporate earnings and a better economic outlook. The Dow industrials is about 1 percent away from an all-time intraday high, reached in October 2007.

Volume has been weak in recent days with the S&P moving sideways around 1,520. The index is about 3 percent away from closing at a record high.

A scarcity of sellers after a consistent string of gains is a positive sign and shows the uptrend is intact, King Lip, chief investment officer at Baker Avenue Asset Management in San Francisco, said.

"Last year we had double-digit returns in the first quarter. It's fairly possible we can move higher from here," he said.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> fell 35.79 points or 0.26 percent, to 13,982.91, the S&P 500 <.spx> gained 0.9 point or 0.06 percent, to 1,520.33 and the Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> added 10.38 points or 0.33 percent, to 3,196.88.

The S&P gained 12 percent in the first three months of 2012.

Deere & Co , the world's largest farm equipment maker, forecast a modest increase in sales this year despite the prospect of the biggest corn crop in U.S. history. The forecast fell short of analysts' expectations, sending shares of Deere down 3.5 percent to $90.68.

In extended trading, shares of technology bellwether Cisco Systems fell 2 percent after it posted results.

Dr Pepper Snapple fell 5.8 percent to $42.69 after it forecast profit for the current year below analysts' estimates.

Cliffs Natural Resources lost a fifth of its market value a day after the miner reported a quarterly loss and slashed its dividend by 76 percent. Its shares fell 20 percent to 429.29.

According to the latest Thomson Reuters data, of the 364 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results, 70.3 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, above a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters.

About 5.9 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the daily average in February last year of 6.94 billion.

On the NYSE, roughly seven issues rose for every five that fell and on Nasdaq more than six rose for every five decliners.

(Editing by Kenneth Barry and Bernadette Baum)

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Despite Claims of Third Blast, North Korean Nuclear Program Remains a Mystery

As scientists and world leaders scrambled Tuesday to judge the importance of North Korea’s claim that it had detonated a third nuclear bomb, the main thing that quickly became evident is how little is known about the country’s increasingly advanced atomic and missile programs.

Even the best news about the test — that it was small by world standards — could have a dangerous downside if the North’s statement that it is learning to miniaturize bombs is true. That technology, which is extremely difficult to master, is crucial to being able to load a weapon atop a long-range missile that might one day reach as far as the United States mainland.

“We don’t know enough to nail it, but we can’t rule out that they’ve done something dangerous” Ray E. Kidder, a scientist who pioneered early nuclear warhead designs at the Livermore weapons lab in California, said of the underground test.

As is usual with tests by the secretive North, it was not even clear if the underground test was nuclear, rather than conventional bomb blasts meant to mimic an underground nuclear test. Experts assume it was nuclear partly from the shape of its seismic signal and because the blast was at the same mountainous site as two earlier nuclear tests.

It also remains unclear whether the North used plutonium or enriched uranium to fuel the bomb. American officials believed that the country’s last two nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009, used plutonium, and they fear a switch to uranium will allow the country a faster and harder-to-detect path to a bigger arsenal. While scientists are actively hunting for the airborne markers of a uranium test, it is not certain that gases needed to make that judgment escaped the test site.

Scientists said the relatively small size of Tuesday’s blast calmed, at least temporarily, their worst fears: that the North’s recent references to more powerful hydrogen bombs indicated the possibility that it might have at least enough technology to try to test one. Those bombs, nicknamed city-busters, are roughly 1,000 times stronger than atom bombs, and if the North were to get them it would represent an enormous leap in its known abilities. The first American hydrogen bomb to be tested caused the Pacific island of Elugelab to vanish.

What emerged most clearly Tuesday from sensitive global networks that measure faint rumbles in the earth was that the underground blast was most likely larger than North Korea’s past explosions. In Vienna, the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which runs a global seismic network, said the blast measured 5.0 in seismic magnitude. The United States Geological Survey put its own estimate at 5.1 in magnitude.

Nuclear experts said the magnitude of the blast equaled an atomic blast of about 6,000 tons of high explosive, or six kilotons. The first test by Pyongyang is thought to have packed less than a kiloton of power and was considered a partial failure by the West. The state’s 2009 blast was judged by American intelligence officials to have a power of two kilotons, though some experts outside the government say it might have been as large as this week’s test.

In any case, said Paul Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., it was “a serious explosion.”

Still, even the largest estimates are small by world standards. The first three nuclear tests of China, for instance, were measured at 22 kilotons, 35 kilotons and 250 kilotons.

North Korea’s tests “are limited in explosive power compared with most previous ones,” said Robert S. Norris, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, and the author of “Racing for the Bomb,” a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s military leader. Determining whether the test was fueled by plutonium or uranium is critical because North Korea in 2007 shut down its reactor that made plutonium, prompting analysts to conclude that its supplies of the rare element are now running low. Intelligence officials estimated it had enough fuel for 6 to 10 bombs.

But in 2010, the state revealed what appears to be a fairly advanced program to enrich uranium, which in theory could fuel many bombs since experts believe that North Korea has rich uranium deposits.

Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico who has repeatedly visited North Korea and learned details of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, has suggested that North Korea may be ready to switch to a pure uranium approach, in part because it might have a blueprint for a miniaturized uranium warhead.

He said the North’s leadership might have obtained the blueprint from A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear expert, a blueprint of the type he gave Libya for a uranium bomb. It is well known that North Korea obtained its centrifuge design for uranium enrichment from Dr. Khan, and many experts say the Pakistani expert may have thrown in the warhead blueprint as a sweetener.

Analysts say the uranium approach may also offer North Korea the allure of a new secrecy. Centrifuge plants are much easier to hide than reactors.

Finding out whether the bomb was fueled by plutonium, uranium or a mix of the two materials could take some time or might never happen, analysts say.

Not all underground tests leak their explosive residues into the atmosphere or surrounding waters, and some say tests of the size of Tuesday’s blast are probably strong enough to seal any cracks in the rocks.

“If we get samples, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot about it,” Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who helped found a federal effort to improve such analyses, said in an interview.

But if no bomb residue leaks, he added, the nature of the fuel that North Korean used for its third blast may remain a mystery.

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Larry Bird's Son Connor Arrested

02/12/2013 at 10:00 PM EST

Conner Bird

Monroe County Sheriff’s Office/AP

Basketball star Larry Bird's son is in trouble with the law.

According to CBS Chicago, 21-year-old Connor Bird was involved in an argument with an ex-girlfriend at his apartment on Sunday afternoon and reportedly threw a cell phone at her.

Hours later, the two drove to a nearby parking lot where the woman got out of the car, intending to walk home, and Conner allegedly attempted to hit her twice with his vehicle.

Bird was later arrested by the Indiana University Police on charges of battery with injury, criminal mischief, intimidation with a deadly weapon and possession of marijuana. He is now free on bail. No trial date has been set.

A lawyer for Bird tells PEOPLE: "What has happened is a very private matter. We’re trying to resolve this as quickly as possible and we're all thankful no one was seriously injured."

Bird was reportedly arrested in 2011 for underage drinking and disorderly conduct, according to TMZ.

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Study questions kidney cancer treatment in elderly

In a stunning example of when treatment might be worse than the disease, a large review of Medicare records finds that older people with small kidney tumors were much less likely to die over the next five years if doctors monitored them instead of operating right away.

Even though nearly all of these tumors turned out to be cancer, they rarely proved fatal. And surgery roughly doubled patients' risk of developing heart problems or dying of other causes, doctors found.

After five years, 24 percent of those who had surgery had died, compared to only 13 percent of those who chose monitoring. Just 3 percent of people in each group died of kidney cancer.

The study only involved people 66 and older, but half of all kidney cancers occur in this age group. Younger people with longer life expectancies should still be offered surgery, doctors stressed.

The study also was observational — not an experiment where some people were given surgery and others were monitored, so it cannot prove which approach is best. Yet it offers a real-world look at how more than 7,000 Medicare patients with kidney tumors fared. Surgery is the standard treatment now.

"I think it should change care" and that older patients should be told "that they don't necessarily need to have the kidney tumor removed," said Dr. William Huang of New York University Langone Medical Center. "If the treatment doesn't improve cancer outcomes, then we should consider leaving them alone."

He led the study and will give results at a medical meeting in Orlando, Fla., later this week. The research was discussed Tuesday in a telephone news conference sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and two other cancer groups.

In the United States, about 65,000 new cases of kidney cancer and 13,700 deaths from the disease are expected this year. Two-thirds of cases are diagnosed at the local stage, when five-year survival is more than 90 percent.

However, most kidney tumors these days are found not because they cause symptoms, but are spotted by accident when people are having an X-ray or other imaging test for something else, like back trouble or chest pain.

Cancer experts increasingly question the need to treat certain slow-growing cancers that are not causing symptoms — prostate cancer in particular. Researchers wanted to know how life-threatening small kidney tumors were, especially in older people most likely to suffer complications from surgery.

They used federal cancer registries and Medicare records from 2000 to 2007 to find 8,317 people 66 and older with kidney tumors less than 1.5 inches wide.

Cancer was confirmed in 7,148 of them. About three-quarters of them had surgery and the rest chose to be monitored with periodic imaging tests.

After five years, 1,536 had died, including 191 of kidney cancer. For every 100 patients who chose monitoring, 11 more were alive at the five-year mark compared to the surgery group. Only 6 percent of those who chose monitoring eventually had surgery.

Furthermore, 27 percent of the surgery group but only 13 percent of the monitoring group developed a cardiovascular problem such as a heart attack, heart disease or stroke. These problems were more likely if doctors removed the entire kidney instead of just a part of it.

The results may help doctors persuade more patients to give monitoring a chance, said a cancer specialist with no role in the research, Dr. Bruce Roth of Washington University in St. Louis.

Some patients with any abnormality "can't sleep at night until something's done about it," he said. Doctors need to say, "We're not sticking our head in the sand, we're going to follow this" and can operate if it gets worse.

One of Huang's patients — 81-year-old Rhona Landorf, who lives in New York City — needed little persuasion.

"I was very happy not to have to be operated on," she said. "He said it's very slow growing and that having an operation would be worse for me than the cancer."

Landorf said her father had been a doctor, and she trusts her doctors' advice. Does she think about her tumor? "Not at all," she said.

___

Online:

Kidney cancer info: http://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/kidney-cancer

and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/kidney

Study: http://gucasym.org

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Comcast to buy rest of NBC stake for $16.7 billion

(Reuters) - Comcast Corp on Tuesday said it would buy General Electric's remaining 49 percent equity stake in their NBCUniversal joint venture for about $16.7 billion, speeding up a deal that had not been expected until at least late 2014.

Analysts said Comcast was getting a good deal at that price, while Comcast's chief executive said the company moved because it was eager to take control of the business sooner than planned.

Comcast shares rose 7.5 percent in afterhours trading.

Comcast bought 51 percent of NBC Universal in 2011 after winning antitrust approval from the Justice Department. The transaction created a $30 billion business that includes broadcast, cable networks, movie studios and theme parks.

"Pretty much in our opinion given that media stocks have gone up quite a bit, it's a very attractive price, a fair price because we had a formula buyout," Comcast Chairman and Chief Executive Brian Roberts said in an interview with Reuters. "We feel many good things coming today and in the future and we wanted to get 100 percent of that for our shareholders."

In addition to the main deal, NBCUniversal will also buy from GE Capital the properties it uses at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City and CNBC's headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, for about $1.4 billion.

Comcast said it would fund the deal with $11.4 billion of cash on hand, $4 billion in senior unsecured notes to be issued to GE, $2 billion in credit facility borrowings and the issuance of $725 million in subsidiary preferred stock to GE.

Separately, Comcast said it would increase its dividend by 20 percent and that it would buy back $2 billion in stock this year. GE also said it would accelerate its own share buy-back program to $10 billion this year.

"It's an attractive price - Comcast is getting a good deal," Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew Harrigan said.

LONG-HELD AMBITIONS

Comcast turned its attention to NBC after a failed $54 billion hostile takeover attempt of Disney in 2004 that ultimately led to the resignation of that company's CEO, Michael Eisner, after more than 20 years on the job.

The hostile offer exposed Comcast's desire to merge content with distribution at a time when most of its industry peers, such as Viacom-CBS and AOL-Time Warner, were doing the opposite.

While Comcast held the title of the nation's leading cable operator by a wide margin, its status as a content player was always second tier, with middling networks like E!, G4 and Golf forming the basis of its channel portfolio.

The NBC deal gave the Philadelphia-based cable operator the cable industry's top-rated entertainment network, USA, its leading business network CNBC, upstart news network MSNBC and Bravo, among others.

For GE, the sale culminates a long-planned exit from the entertainment business.

Since reaching the deal to sell its majority stake in NBC Universal, GE officials have made clear that they eventually planned to exit the entertainment business entirely.

The initial sale contract gave GE the option to sell back as much as all its remaining stake in NBC Universal by mid-2014.

The company's accelerated share buyback could be an answer to shareholders, who have wondered what GE would do with a cash windfall that could total tens of billions of dollars over several years, as the company sold its remaining NBC stake and recouped more profits earned by GE Capital.

COMCAST EARNINGS

In addition to the GE deal, Comcast reported fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday.

It posted $15.94 billion in revenue, up 6 percent from a year ago. It posted net income of $1.8 billion, or 56 cents per share, up from $1.56 billion, or 47 cents a year ago.

In its cable business, it lost a net 7,000 video customers, which is better than the 17,000 subscribers lost a year ago.

Wall Street analysts were expecting Comcast to lose 5,000 customers, according to StreetAccount. It added 341,000 Internet customers in the quarter, which beat the 329,000 new customers analysts were expecting.

Comcast shares rose to $41.89 after the market close from $38.97 in regular trading. GE shares rose 3 percent to $23.37 from a $22.58 close.

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker, Jennifer Saba and Peter Lauria in New York, Diane Bartz in Washington, Scott Malone in Boston and A. Ananthalakshmi in Bangalore; Writing by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Dan Grebler)

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North Korea Promises to Test More Rockets

SEOUL, South Korea — The Politburo of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party has called for the continued testing of long-range rockets despite the condemnation of previous tests by the United Nations Security Council, the country’s official media reported Tuesday.

In a meeting on Monday, the Politburo, the main decision-making body of the party, said that more rocket tests could be an appropriate way to celebrate the 65th anniversary of North Korea’s founding and the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War.

North Korea declared itself as an independent state on Sept. 9, 1948, three years after the liberation of the Korean Peninsula from Japanese colonial rule. It also marks July 27, the day when the truce was signed 60 years ago to end the Korean War. North Korea celebrates those dates each year with hostile statements directed at countries it considers its enemies, as well as with festivities aimed at increasing domestic support for its top leaders.

The Monday meeting was the first time the Politburo had convened since July 2012, when it decided to dismiss Ri Yong-ho, a senior army general. That dismissal turned out to be the beginning of a round of political purges under the new supreme leader, Kim Jong-un.

The 10-point decision adopted at the meeting on Monday called for a huge military parade in Pyongyang, the capital, to mark the anniversary of the July 27 truce, as well as the construction of an international tourism complex in Wonsan, a port on the central eastern coast of North Korea. The Politburo also called for South Korea to fulfill promises to make large investments in the North, which were part of agreements reached in 2000 and 2007.

But the statement did not mention the nuclear test that North Korea has recently threatened to carry out. Officials in South Korea say that enough preparations have been made at a nuclear test site in northeastern North Korea that a test could happen at any time.

The Politburo decision “stressed continuing to launch Kwangmyongsong-class satellites and powerful long-range rockets,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported in its Tuesday dispatch, adding that North Korea should mark the two anniversaries this year with “new achievements for strengthening national defense.”

North Korea launched a rocket on Dec. 12, putting its Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite into orbit, the first for the impoverished country. Washington and its allies said that the rocket launching was a cover for North Korea to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach North America. The Security Council condemned the launching as a violation of its earlier resolutions that banned the North from testing technology used for ballistic missiles, and last month it adopted another resolution ordering the tightening of sanctions against North Korea.

North Korea has since issued a series of statements threatening more rocket and nuclear tests. The country conducted an underground nuclear test in 2006 and again in 2009.

The Politburo is the center of power in the Workers’ Party. Its Presidium consists of Mr. Kim, who is the top party secretary, and other leaders loyal to him.

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It's a Girl for John Cho

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/11/2013 at 06:30 PM ET

Paul Drinkwater/NBC

Surprise: Actor John Cho is a dad again!

The Go On star and his wife welcomed a daughter recently, Cho’s rep confirms to PEOPLE exclusively.

Baby girl is the second child for the couple, who are also parents to a son. No further details are available.

Cho currently stars alongside Jason Bateman in Identity Thief and will reprise his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek Into Darkness in May.

He is also well known for his roles in American Pie and the Harold and Kumar films.

– Anya Leon with reporting by Julie Jordan

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