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MILAN (AP) -AC Milan denied reports striker Mario Balotelli was involved in an argument with police after parking illegally on Thursday.
"Today at Milan airport local police carried out a normal check on the Audi car being used by Mario Balotelli," the club said in a statement.
"Contrary to what has been reported by some sources, there was no argument between the parties and at the end of the check Mario Balotelli went to Milanello as usual for training."
Earlier, Italian media reports said Balotelli, who was on his way to collect friends, was told to move his car when he stopped in a no-parking zone in front of Milan's Linate airport.
The Italy striker did so, but then parked again illegally. Balotelli was fined by the traffic police for not having his insurance documents on him.
Balotelli allegedly reacted badly, getting into a heated discussion with them, and passing police had to intervene to calm the situation.
Hours later, Balotelli was pictured training at Milanello, talking to Paolo Berlusconi, the younger brother of Milan's owner and former premier, Silvio Berlusconi.
Paolo Berlusconi caused outrage when he told a crowd of supporters on Sunday that he was off to San Siro to see "the family's little black boy," meaning Balotelli.
Balotelli returned to Italy last week in a ?20 million ($27 million) transfer from Manchester City.
He scored both goals in a 2-1 win over Udinese on Sunday.
? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Time to bring Landon back
PST: Landon Donovan's future with the U.S. national team remains up in the air. But one thing is certain -- the U.S. missed his presence against Honduras.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? In a country where one in four women is raped and where months-old babies and 94-year-old grandmothers are sexually assaulted, citizens are demanding action after a teenager was gang-raped, sliced open from her stomach to her genitals, and left for dead on a construction site last week.
The 17-year-old lived long enough to identify one of her attackers, a 22-year-old. Police arrested him and said Thursday they have arrested a second suspect, aged 21. They promised more arrests soon.
"Kill them!" and "Cut off their penises," were some of the demands voiced on talk show radio stations Thursday.
Every few months this African nation with the highest rate of rapes of babies and young girls in the world yells its outrage at a particularly brutal attack.
Last year, South Africans were shocked when village boys gang-raped a mentally ill 17-year-old with a mental age of 4. She was attacked by six boys, the youngest who was 10, in a crime that only came to light because the boys made a cellphone video of the rape and posted it on the Internet. It went viral.
Prof. Rachel Jewkes, a doctor heading the Women's Research Unit of South Africa's Medical Research Council, said 37 percent of surveyed men in South Africa's most populated province of Gauteng said they had raped a woman or child, according to a study. Seventy-five percent of them first raped a teenager, she said.
"It's a social disaster," she said. The number of "men who try to feel better about their past by trying to make out that what they did wasn't serious or wasn't rape is obviously huge and must be a huge obstacle to getting anything done ? from police making arrests to decisions in the courtroom by magistrates and so forth."
The outcry over Saturday's rape in Bredasdorp, a Western Cape town known for its giant protea flowers, led President Jacob Zuma to vow Thursday "that government would never rest until the perpetrators and all those who rape and abuse women and children, are meted with the maximum justice that the law allows."
The maximum sentence for rape in South Africa is life in prison. The death sentence has been abolished.
Zuma himself was accused of rape by the HIV-positive lesbian daughter of a close friend in 2005. Zuma said the sex was consensual and he was acquitted, but is unlikely to live down his comment in court that he had a shower afterward to cut the risk of acquiring AIDS.
In a study conducted by Jewkes in 2009, 62 percent of surveyed boys over age 11 said they believed that forcing someone to have sex was not an act of violence. One-third said girls enjoy being raped.
That study found one-quarter of South African women are raped but only one in 25 report it to the police. Of those who were not raped by a partner, one in 13 had never reported the rape, and many had been raped more than once, Jewkes said. That casts doubt on police statistics showing sexual crimes decreased from 70,514 in 2009 to 64,419 last year. Females make up half of South Africa's population of 50 million.
Official statistics show less than 10 percent of reported sexual crimes result in a successful prosecution, another reason many are reluctant to report rape.
A British documentary, "Lost Girls of South Africa," concludes girls here have a bigger chance of being raped than of completing high school.
Studies show nearly 90 percent of victims are raped by family members, friends or other people they know. Girls are not safe at home or at school, with many reports of teachers having sex with students anxious to get good examination results.
Many reasons have been given for South Africa suffering the highest incidence of rape in the world. This is a patriarchal society where many men believe they are entitled to sex. The mother of an 11-year-old girl raped by her father told a court that her husband said no man had a right to have sex with his child until he had her.
The brutality of the white apartheid regime often is blamed, with psychologists saying that humiliated men work out their anger on those nearest and most helpless, their families.
Pervasive poverty, which also disempowers men and forces children to sleep in one-room shacks with adults, also is blamed.
That excuse was angrily dismissed in a Twitter debate last weekend.
"No one can tell me that raping a 3-month baby or 87-year-old granny or burning a library or vandalizing a school is caused by poverty," tweeted Zwelinzima Vavi, head of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. "Yes, apartheid humiliated, dehumanized and made people feel valueless - its existence in the past is no excuse for current moral degeneration."
Eastern KwaZulu-Natal province last year set up day-care centers for elderly women after several were raped.
Perhaps the saddest comment came from one protesting grandmother outside a court where a man was accused of raping a 94-year-old.
"It's becoming clear that our grandchildren and great-grandsons are targeting us and it is only stiff sentences like castration and death that will stop this from happening," 68-year-old Thokozile Gcumisa was quoted as saying in The Sowetan newspaper. "We fear our own flesh and blood."
IRVING, Texas (AP) ? Caught in an ideological crossfire, the Boy Scouts of America is putting off until May a decision on whether to ease its policy of excluding gays. Whatever the organization eventually does, it's likely to anger major constituencies and worsen schisms within Scouting.
The delay, which the Scouts attributed to "the complexity of this issue," was announced Wednesday after closed-door deliberations by the BSA's national executive board. Under consideration was a proposal to ease the longstanding ban on gays by allowing sponsors of local troops to decide for themselves on the membership of gay Scouts and adult leaders.
As the board met over three days at a hotel near Dallas, it became clear that the proposal would be unacceptable to large numbers of impassioned Scouting families and advocacy groups on both the left and right.
The iconic youth organization is now deeply entangled in the broader cultural and political conflicts over such issues as same-sex marriage and religious freedom. Tilting toward either side will probably alienate the other, and a midway balancing act will be difficult.
Gay-rights supporters contend that no Scout units anywhere should exclude gays, and vowed to maintain pressure on the BSA's corporate donors to achieve that goal. Some conservatives, including religious leaders whose churches sponsor troops, warned of mass defections if the ban were even partially eased. They urged supporters to flood headquarters with phone calls.
"In the past two weeks, Scouting has received an outpouring of feedback from the American public," said the BSA's national spokesman, Deron Smith. "It reinforces how deeply people care about Scouting and how passionate they are about the organization."
The BSA "needs time for a more deliberate review of its membership policy," Smith added. He said the board would prepare a resolution to be voted on by the 1,400 voting members of the BSA national council at a meeting during the week of May 20 in Grapevine, Texas.
The organization had announced last week that it was considering allowing Scout troops to decide whether to allow gay membership, ensuring that the executive board meeting would be in the national spotlight.
Learning that a decision would be deferred, gay-rights leaders assailed the BSA.
"Every day that the Boy Scouts of America delay action is another day that discrimination prevails," said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign. "Young Americans, gay and straight, are hurt by the inaction associated with today's news."
"A Scout is supposed to be brave, and the Boy Scouts failed to be brave today," said Jennifer Tyrrell, an Ohio mother ousted as a den leader of her son's Cub Scout pack because she's a lesbian.
"They failed us yet again," she told The Associated Press. "Putting this off until May only ensures other gay kids and gay parents are discarded."
Tyrrell was among several current and former Scouts and supporters who rallied outside BSA national headquarters Monday and delivered petitions opposing the policy.
Conservative leaders made clear they would keep pressure on the BSA ahead of the May meeting.
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said his group would continue warning the BSA "about the grave consequences that would result if they were to compromise their moral standards in the face of threats from corporate elites and homosexual activists."
About 70 percent of all Scout units are sponsored by religious denominations, including many by conservative faiths that have supported the ban, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Mormon church.
The delay was welcomed by Southern Baptist leaders, some of whom had said they would urge their churches to seek alternatives to the Boy Scouts if the ban were eliminated.
In comments to the Baptist Press, the denomination's official news agency, SBC President Fred Luter suggested that "prayers of the righteous" played a role in the BSA decision.
The National Catholic Committee on Scouting said it would join in the BSA's consultations over the coming months. Whatever the outcome, the committee said, "Catholic chartered units will continue to provide leaders who promote and live Catholic values."
Michael Purdy, a spokesman at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquarters in Utah, said the BSA "acted wisely in delaying its decision until all voices can be heard on this important moral issue."
The extra time will give local Scout leaders in Utah and elsewhere time to determine how their members feel about the proposal, said Kay Godfrey, a spokesman for Boy Scouts in the Great Salt Lake Council. The heavily Mormon council is one of the largest in the country, with 5,500 troops and 73,400 youth members.
"It's so important and so historic in nature that serious deliberation over time, involving a broad spectrum of folks, is needed," Godfrey said.
Outside BSA headquarters, hundreds of supporters of the ban held a rally and prayer vigil Wednesday, carrying signs that read, "Don't invite sin into the camp" and "Homosexuality is a sin! BSA please resist Satan's test. Uphold the ban."
Scoutmaster Darrel Russell of Weatherford, west of Fort Worth, took his wife and five of their seven children to the rally. Russell said having gays in the scouting movement would be like mixing boys and girls.
"The whole idea is to protect our boys at all costs," Russell said, warning that if the ban is lifted, "we're shutting down our troop."
Among those joining the debate was New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an Eagle Scout who told reporters the ban should be lifted.
"I can't urge them enough to make sure that every young man is eligible, regardless of his orientation, to be a scout and to benefit from a great program that really helps kids develop," he said.
In Washington, White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on the BSA's delay but reiterated President Barack Obama's view that gays should be able to participate in the Scouts.
Members of the Scouts' executive board remained silent about their deliberations during and after their meeting. Police and security guards blocked journalists from entering the meeting area, and board members approached as they walked to their cars outside the hotel declined to comment.
However, it's likely the board ? and corporations that contribute to the BSA ? will face continued pressure.
By delaying the vote, the Scouts "have guaranteed continuing controversy and increased pressures on corporate sponsors to withdraw funding," said professor Kenneth Sherrill, a gay rights advocate who teaches political science at Hunter College in New York.
No national polling has been released conveying how current Scout parents and leaders feel about the ban. But overall, U.S. voters favor eliminating it by 55 percent to 33 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. Quinnipiac said the poll's margin of error was plus/minus 2.3 percentage points.
"Now that the armed forces ban on openly gay service members has been lifted, and polls show increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage, most American voters think it's time to open up the Boy Scouts, too," said Peter Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac's Polling Institute.
___
Crary reported from New York.
___
Associated Press writers Jamie Stengle in Irving, Texas; Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed to this report.
"The Bachelor" continues the second part of its two-night event on Tuesday at 9 PM ET/PT, and Sean Lowe hinted contestant Tierra, who has provided no shortage of drama when she's with the women, might be sticking around on the show a little while longer.
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UAB researchers cure type 1 diabetes in dogsPublic release date: 7-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Octavi Lpez Coronado octavi.lopez@uab.cat 34935813301 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Introducing a 'glucose sensor' by gene therapy eliminates the symptoms of the disease
Researchers from the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona (UAB), led by Ftima Bosch, have shown for the first time that it is possible to cure diabetes in large animals with a single session of gene therapy. As published this week in Diabetes, the principal journal for research on the disease, after a single gene therapy session, the dogs recover their health and no longer show symptoms of the disease. In some cases, monitoring continued for over four years, with no recurrence of symptoms.
The therapy is minimally invasive. It consists of a single session of various injections in the animal's rear legs using simple needles that are commonly used in cosmetic treatments. These injections introduce gene therapy vectors, with a dual objective: to express the insulin gene, on the one hand, and that of glucokinase, on the other. Glucokinase is an enzyme that regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood. When both genes act simultaneously they function as a "glucose sensor", which automatically regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood, thus reducing diabetic hyperglycemia (the excess of blood sugar associated with the disease).
As Ftima Bosch, the head researcher, points out, "this study is the first to demonstrate a long-term cure for diabetes in a large animal model using gene therapy."
This same research group had already tested this type of therapy on mice, but the excellent results obtained for the first time with large animals lays the foundations for the clinical translation of this gene therapy approach to veterinary medicine and eventually to diabetic patients.
The study was led by the head of the UAB's Centre for Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy (CBATEG) Ftima Bosch, and involved the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the UAB, the Department of Medicine and Animal Surgery of the UAB, the Faculty of Veterinary Science of the UAB, the Department of Animal Health and Anatomy of the UAB, the Spanish Biomedical Research Centre in Diabetes and Associated Metabolic Disorders (CIBERDEM), the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (USA) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Philadelphia (USA).
A safe and efficacious gene therapy
The study provides ample data showing the safety of gene therapy mediated by adeno-associated vectors (AAV) in diabetic dogs. The therapy has proved to be safe and efficacious: it is based on the transfer of two genes to the muscle of adult animals using a new generation of very safe vectors known as adeno-associated vectors. These vectors, derived from non-pathogenic viruses, are widely used in gene therapy and have been successful in treating several diseases.
In fact, the first gene therapy medicine ever approved by the European Medicines Agency, named Glybera, makes use of adeno-associated vectors to treat a metabolic disease caused by a deficiency of lipoprotein lipase and the resulting accumulation of triglycerides in the blood.
Long-term control of the disease
Dogs treated with a single administration of gene therapy showed good glucose control at all times, both when fasting and when fed, improving on that of dogs given daily insulin injections, and with no episodes of hypoglycemia, even after exercise. Furthermore, the dogs treated with adeno-associated vectors improved their body weight and had not developed secondary complications four years after the treatment.
The study is the first to report optimal long-term control of diabetes in large animals. This had never before been achieved with any other innovative therapies for diabetes. The study is also the first to report that a single administration of genes to diabetic dogs is able to maintain normoglycemia over the long term (more than 4 years). As well as achieving normoglycemia, the dogs had normal levels of glycosylated proteins and developed no secondary complications of diabetes after more than 4 years with the disease.
Application in diabetic patients
There have been multiple clinical trials in which AAV vectors have been introduced into skeletal muscle, so the strategy reported in this study is feasible for clinical translation. Future safety and efficacy studies will provide the bases for initiating a clinical veterinary trial of diabetes treatment for companion animals, which will supply key information for eventual trials with humans. In conclusion, this study paves the way for the clinical translation of this approach to gene therapy to veterinary medicine, and eventually to diabetic patients.
Diabetes mellitus
Diabetes mellitus is the most common metabolic disease, and a large number of patients need insulin treatment to survive. In spite of the use of insulin injections to control the disease, these patients often develop serious secondary complications like blindness, kidney damage or amputation of limbs. Moreover, in order to achieve good blood glucose control, insulin has to be injected two or three times a day, which brings a risk of hypoglycemia episodes (lowering of blood sugar): an additional problem that comes on top of the other hardships of the treatment.
###
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
UAB researchers cure type 1 diabetes in dogsPublic release date: 7-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Octavi Lpez Coronado octavi.lopez@uab.cat 34935813301 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Introducing a 'glucose sensor' by gene therapy eliminates the symptoms of the disease
Researchers from the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona (UAB), led by Ftima Bosch, have shown for the first time that it is possible to cure diabetes in large animals with a single session of gene therapy. As published this week in Diabetes, the principal journal for research on the disease, after a single gene therapy session, the dogs recover their health and no longer show symptoms of the disease. In some cases, monitoring continued for over four years, with no recurrence of symptoms.
The therapy is minimally invasive. It consists of a single session of various injections in the animal's rear legs using simple needles that are commonly used in cosmetic treatments. These injections introduce gene therapy vectors, with a dual objective: to express the insulin gene, on the one hand, and that of glucokinase, on the other. Glucokinase is an enzyme that regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood. When both genes act simultaneously they function as a "glucose sensor", which automatically regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood, thus reducing diabetic hyperglycemia (the excess of blood sugar associated with the disease).
As Ftima Bosch, the head researcher, points out, "this study is the first to demonstrate a long-term cure for diabetes in a large animal model using gene therapy."
This same research group had already tested this type of therapy on mice, but the excellent results obtained for the first time with large animals lays the foundations for the clinical translation of this gene therapy approach to veterinary medicine and eventually to diabetic patients.
The study was led by the head of the UAB's Centre for Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy (CBATEG) Ftima Bosch, and involved the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the UAB, the Department of Medicine and Animal Surgery of the UAB, the Faculty of Veterinary Science of the UAB, the Department of Animal Health and Anatomy of the UAB, the Spanish Biomedical Research Centre in Diabetes and Associated Metabolic Disorders (CIBERDEM), the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (USA) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Philadelphia (USA).
A safe and efficacious gene therapy
The study provides ample data showing the safety of gene therapy mediated by adeno-associated vectors (AAV) in diabetic dogs. The therapy has proved to be safe and efficacious: it is based on the transfer of two genes to the muscle of adult animals using a new generation of very safe vectors known as adeno-associated vectors. These vectors, derived from non-pathogenic viruses, are widely used in gene therapy and have been successful in treating several diseases.
In fact, the first gene therapy medicine ever approved by the European Medicines Agency, named Glybera, makes use of adeno-associated vectors to treat a metabolic disease caused by a deficiency of lipoprotein lipase and the resulting accumulation of triglycerides in the blood.
Long-term control of the disease
Dogs treated with a single administration of gene therapy showed good glucose control at all times, both when fasting and when fed, improving on that of dogs given daily insulin injections, and with no episodes of hypoglycemia, even after exercise. Furthermore, the dogs treated with adeno-associated vectors improved their body weight and had not developed secondary complications four years after the treatment.
The study is the first to report optimal long-term control of diabetes in large animals. This had never before been achieved with any other innovative therapies for diabetes. The study is also the first to report that a single administration of genes to diabetic dogs is able to maintain normoglycemia over the long term (more than 4 years). As well as achieving normoglycemia, the dogs had normal levels of glycosylated proteins and developed no secondary complications of diabetes after more than 4 years with the disease.
Application in diabetic patients
There have been multiple clinical trials in which AAV vectors have been introduced into skeletal muscle, so the strategy reported in this study is feasible for clinical translation. Future safety and efficacy studies will provide the bases for initiating a clinical veterinary trial of diabetes treatment for companion animals, which will supply key information for eventual trials with humans. In conclusion, this study paves the way for the clinical translation of this approach to gene therapy to veterinary medicine, and eventually to diabetic patients.
Diabetes mellitus
Diabetes mellitus is the most common metabolic disease, and a large number of patients need insulin treatment to survive. In spite of the use of insulin injections to control the disease, these patients often develop serious secondary complications like blindness, kidney damage or amputation of limbs. Moreover, in order to achieve good blood glucose control, insulin has to be injected two or three times a day, which brings a risk of hypoglycemia episodes (lowering of blood sugar): an additional problem that comes on top of the other hardships of the treatment.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
FLM.TV?? is the industry?s newest pay-per-view VOD site to provide a free online video-streaming platform for indie filmmakers, festivals and distributors to showcase their work to a worldwide viewing audience.
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Public release date: 7-Feb-2013
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