Pope pardons ex-butler who stole, leaked documents

VATICAN CITY (AP) ? Pope Benedict XVI granted his former butler a Christmas pardon Saturday, forgiving him in person during a jailhouse meeting for stealing and leaking private papers in one of the gravest Vatican security breaches in recent times.

After the 15-minute meeting, Paolo Gabriele was freed and returned to his Vatican City apartment where he lives with his wife and three children. The Vatican said he couldn't continue living or working in the Vatican, but said it would find him housing and a job elsewhere soon.

"This is a paternal gesture toward someone with whom the pope for many years shared daily life," according to a statement from the Vatican secretariat of state.

The pardon closes a painful and embarrassing chapter for the Vatican, capping a sensational, Hollywood-like scandal that exposed power struggles, intrigue and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons in the highest levels of the Catholic Church.

Gabriele, 46, was arrested May 23 after Vatican police found what they called an "enormous" stash of papal documents in his Vatican City apartment. He was convicted of aggravated theft by a Vatican tribunal on Oct. 6 and has been serving his 18-month sentence in the Vatican police barracks.

He told Vatican investigators he gave the documents to Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi because he thought the 85-year-old pope wasn't being informed of the "evil and corruption" in the Vatican and thought that exposing it publicly would put the church back on the right track.

The publication of the leaked documents, first on Italian television then in Nuzzi's book "His Holiness: Pope Benedict XVI's Secret Papers" convulsed the Vatican all year, a devastating betrayal of the pope from within his papal family that exposed the unseemly side of the Catholic Church's governance.

The papal pardon had been widely expected before Christmas, and the jailhouse meeting Benedict used to personally deliver it recalled the image of Pope John Paul II visiting Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot him in 1981, while he served his sentence in an Italian prison.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the meeting was "intense" and "personal" and said that during it Benedict "communicated to him in person that he had accepted his request for pardon, commuting his sentence."

None of the documents threatened the papacy. Most were of interest only to Italians, as they concerned relations between Italy and the Vatican and a few local scandals and personalities. Their main aim appeared to be to discredit Benedict's trusted No. 2, the secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

Vatican officials have said the theft shattered the confidentiality that typically governs correspondence with the pope. Cardinals, bishops and everyday laymen write to him about spiritual and practical matters assuming that their words will be treated with the discretion for which the Holy See is known.

As a result, it prompted a remarkable reaction, with the pope naming a commission of three cardinals to investigate alongside Vatican prosecutors. Italian news reports have said new security measures and personnel checks have been put in place to prevent a repeat offense.

Gabriele insisted he acted alone, with no accomplices, but it remains an open question whether any other heads will roll. Technically the criminal investigation remains open, and few in the Vatican believe Gabriele could have construed such a plot without at least the endorsement if not the outright help of others.

A Vatican computer expert, Claudio Sciarpelletti, was convicted Nov. 10 of aiding and abetting Gabriele by changing his testimony to Vatican investigators about the origins of an envelope with Gabriele's name on it that was found in his desk. His two-month sentence was suspended.

Benedict met this past week with the cardinals who investigated the origins of the leaks, but it wasn't known if they provided him with any further updates or were merely meeting ahead of the expected pardon for Gabriele.

As supreme executive, legislator and judge in Vatican City, the pope had the power to pardon Gabriele even before he went to trial. The only question was when it would come.

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-pardons-ex-butler-stole-leaked-documents-122111410.html

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Self Improvement Times: Best Tips On Improving Self Esteem

Improving ones self esteem is in many people's mind. There are two main factors on improving your self esteem, it's either you actively pursuing it or you subconsciously working on it. You may first want to identify what makes you feel awkward or shy when you are interacting with people.

Improving self esteem is easier when you have a subliminal audio to listen to. There are subliminal messages hidden underneath relaxing music and the messages are contained with positive affirmations that only your subconscious mind can understand. So, while you are physically working on your self esteem, your subconscious mind is also helping you at the same time.

Here are some easy ways on improving your self esteem:

1. Set a viable goal for yourself. Visualize how you want to feel and start acting like that when you are interacting with people. Try to think that you are the person that you are interacting with. Can you picture an interesting person? Set a believable goal for yourself, for example: within the next two weeks, when you interact with people you feel like you are a good conversationalist.

2. Be positive. When you want to practice your self esteem, begin the conversation. If you are in a crowd like a party, begin introducing yourself to a person who is alone. This is a way to slowly improve your self esteem and you won't feel that you are left behind. Now, prepare for your meeting. Take a deep breath and stand with a good posture so you feel more confident. If you have difficulty approaching people, you may use subliminal messages with positive affirmations. These positive affirmations will make you feel important and that you are a good person in general. When you give importance to yourself then improving you self esteem will be easier.

3. Extend a firm handshake and look directly in the eyes of the person. The firm handshake and the direct eye contact signify self esteem. Your handshake should say that you are really glad meeting that person and your eye contact should say that you are interested meeting that person. Approach the person by saying something positive to her like "I love your earrings".

4. Always listen. Listen to your conversation and respond visibly. If you are in the process of improving your self esteem then you could practice in the mirror so you know how you look when you are actually meeting a person. Again, clear your mind before creating a conversation so you could have more space for listening. You can clear your mind more effectively if you use the subliminal audio that has subliminal messages for mind clarity.

5. Respond. Visibly respond to the person like nodding or smiling, this way you can create good aura for the both of you. If you respond, you may begin in "I agree" or "I have the same experience". You can get a more positive response through subliminal messages' that release self esteem messages to your subconscious mind.

6. Feel good about yourself. Always feel that you are important, value yourself. A subliminal audio that imparts positive affirmations can always help you on improving your self esteem. When you feel good about yourself then people will see you as a happy person and they will be more interested in you.

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Source: http://selfimprovementtimes.blogspot.com/2012/12/best-tips-on-improving-self-esteem.html

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YC Grad & Esther Dyson-Backed Eligible Wants To Be The Stripe For Healthcare Transactions

While there is a long list of startups that are using modern technology to improve healthcare and education -- to make us healthier and more effective teachers and learners -- many are still shying away from some of the most challenging technical problems. Not that this comes as a surprise, as both industries suffer from some intractable legacy infrastructure. Modernizing the infrastructures themselves, along with the way health companies integrate and exchange data is a difficult task. Eligible, a San Francisco-based startup and member of Y Combinator's most recent batch, is meeting this challenge head on. Big data is transforming healthcare (and education), and Eligible has set out to build a modern, standardized set of protocols to make it more accessible. A member of the same YC class as Clever, Eligible is applying the very same philosophy of its classmate to healthcare -- to pulling down the barriers that restrict its interoperability, making it easier to manage and integrate.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/V64XsrwX0E0/

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Fiscal cliff setback rattles shares, euro

LONDON (Reuters) - Global stock markets weakened on Friday and both the euro and gold slipped, as a new setback in talks to avert a U.S. fiscal crisis and evidence of Europe's ongoing economic difficulties stoked investor nerves.

A proposal from Republican leader John Boehner to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff failed to get support from his party on Thursday, casting fresh uncertainty over talks to avoid across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts that could push the U.S. economy into recession in 2013.

Anxiety was exacerbated by weaker-than-expected data from key corners of Europe, as German consumer morale dropped to its lowest level in more than a year, Britain revised down growth figures and Sweden slashed its economic forecasts.

The combined worries prompted widespread selling in most major stock markets and saw investors head for traditional safe-haven assets.

The dollar and yen and U.S. and German Government bonds all rose as falls on London <.ftse>, Paris <.fchi> and Frankfurt <.gdaxi> equity markets compounded tumbles in Asia to leave MSCI's global index <.miwd00000pus> down 0.4 percent.

Futures prices also pointed to sharp falls when trading resumes on Wall Street later, with the S&P 500 Dow Jones and Nasdaq 100 all seen losing around 1.4 percent.

Nevertheless, European and global share indices remain on course for their fifth straight week of gains. In the U.S., the S&P 500 is up about 1.8 percent so far this week and 14.8 percent on the year.

"Risk assets look vulnerable over the holiday trading period. The recent performance of key benchmarks has priced in a satisfactory outcome to the U.S. fiscal discussions, which is far from a done deal," said Peel Hunt strategist Ian Williams.

Boehner will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), likely to focus on the budget wrangling.

Bickering U.S. politicians have only 10 days left to resolve their differences and prevent automatic tax hikes and spending cuts worth around $600 billion kicking in in the new year.

Most observers are still assuming the two sides will avert disaster but tensions are likely to intensify over the normally quiet Christmas period as the deadline draws near.

"The markets are likely to interpret this as signaling even tougher negotiations in coming days," Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of bond giant PIMCO, told Reuters.

CLIFF HANGER

Oil and gold were also caught up in the U.S. disappointment. Brent crude oil fell more than $1 per barrel before clawing back some ground. Bullion pared earlier losses but remained on track for its steepest weekly drop since June.

"The market volume is thin amidst all these uncertainties, and the year is coming to an end. Many of the investors prefer to take profits and just leave the market," said Brian Lan, managing director of GoldSilver Central Pte Ltd in Singapore.

In currency markets, strengthening appetite for safe-haven assets saw the yen firm and the highly liquid U.S. dollar <.dxy> climb 0.2 percent against a basket of key currencies.

At the same time, concerns over the U.S. impasse dented demand for so-called high-beta currencies that tend to rise or fall with the global growth outlook, such as the Australian dollar and euro.

Weaker German data, which saw consumer confidence unexpectedly drop for a fourth month running, kept downward pressure on the euro which retreated further from a 8-1/2 month high hit earlier in the week, to stand at $1.3200.

"This is a classic risk-off trading environment where the yen did best, followed by the dollar, and higher-beta currencies underperformed," said Audrey Childe-Freeman, head of FX strategy at BMO Capital Markets.

"We have had a very good run in the euro and what we are seeing at the moment is a little bit of profit-taking triggered by disappointment in the fiscal cliff discussions."

CAUTION

Caution also prevailed in Europe's bond markets, where German government bonds climbed at the expense of recently resurgent euro zone periphery debt.

Other safe-haven bonds followed the trend, with U.S. 10-year Treasury yields dipping from an 8-week high hit this week to 1.74 percent and 10-year Japanese yields inching down 0.765 percent.

Jim Barnes, senior fixed income manager at National Penn Investors Trust Co. in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, saw Treasuries continuing to gain once U.S. markets open later, but expected a correction by the end of the day.

"Treasury yields will likely fall Friday morning and will begin to reverse course in the afternoon as investors become more optimistic a deal will be reached," Barnes said.

(Additional reporting by Emelia Sithole-Matarise, David Brett; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/asian-shares-slide-uncertainty-grows-over-fiscal-cliff-030255105--finance.html

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Video: Testing Wi-Fi with a sack of potatoes

>>> and we have put the list of the best and worst-scoring vehicles on our website for you tonight.

>>> to the air now. if you think we passengers are sometimes regarded by the airlines as a sack of potatoes, here's your proof. boeing says it uses sacks of potatoes instead of humans when testing on-board wi-fi. using potatoes means they don't have to impose on humans. they say potatoes by the sack, mimic the bulk of actual bodies where wireless signal transmissions are concerned.

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/50264241/

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Armchair science: Bag and tag glowing galactic clouds

Dec. 20, 2012 ? A new galactic game launches today that lets citizen scientists identify the glowing clouds where future stars will be born. The online experience, called Clouds, is a new addition to the Milky Way Project, where everyone can help astronomers to sort and measure our galaxy. Clouds features images and data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important participation from NASA.

In the rapid-fire game, players gauge whether a targeted section of a presented image is a cloud, a "hole" -- an empty region of space -- or something in between. The cataloging of these snapshots of the local cosmos will help astronomers learn more about the architecture and character of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

The organizers of Clouds encourage astronomy enthusiasts to start playing now because with enough participation, important insights into the Milky Way could come as soon as early next year.

"We're really excited to launch Clouds and see results back from our giant volunteer team of amateur scientists," said Robert Simpson, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Oxford University, England and principal investigator of the Milky Way Project. "We think the community can blast through all these data fairly quickly. We may even be done by the spring and that would be an amazing result for citizen science."

Clouds joins its predecessor Milky Way Project game, Bubbles, as one of the many "crowdsourced" efforts underway at Zooniverse, home to the Internet's biggest and most popular online citizen science projects.

The crowdsourcing concept involves having a lot of people evaluate the same image or pieces of data. A consensus decision on some aspect of the image is then reached through the collective "wisdom of crowds." Crowdsourced citizen science becomes especially important when humans can do a better job at analyzing images or objects than a computer can. The Clouds game is an example of just such an exercise in which eyeballs and brains beat out cameras and computer algorithms.

The goal of Clouds is to tag the dense, cold cores of gas and dust known as infrared dark clouds. These clouds collapse under their own gravity and then burst forth as new stars. An empty region of space, however, can look rather like one of these dark clouds and deceive a computer accordingly. "Automated routines have tried to decide which of these objects are holes and which are true infrared dark clouds, but the task is often tricky and it takes a human eye to decide," said Simpson.

Clouds combines infrared observations from Herschel and Spitzer to reveal cool clouds and holes throughout the Milky Way's disk. The Herschel data, at a wavelength of 250 microns, appears in yellow throughout the game. The Spitzer data, at 8 microns, is rendered in blue.

Together with its companion Bubbles game, Clouds serves as another example of how Zooniverse makes cutting-edge scientific investigation freely available to the general public. "Citizen science through Zooniverse has been a real boon to research in fields ranging from astronomy to biology to history," noted Simpson. "We feel very fortunate to be able to send science work out to computer, tablet and smartphone screens and for people to collaborate with us in a quest to better understand our universe."

For those interested in looking for infrared clouds and contributing to the Milky Way Project, visit the following link: http://www.milkywayproject.org. To learn of other citizen science-based efforts, check out the Zooniverse: https://www.zooniverse.org.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/astronomy/~3/XJkLa00ZO7w/121220210605.htm

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Scientists create nanoscale window to biological world

Dec. 20, 2012 ? If the key to winning battles is knowing both your enemy and yourself, then scientists are now well on their way toward becoming the Sun Tzus of medicine by taking a giant step toward a priceless advantage -- the ability to see the soldiers in action on the battlefield.

Investigators at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute have invented a way to directly image biological structures at their most fundamental level and in their natural habitats. The technique is a major advancement toward the ultimate goal of imaging biological processes in action at the atomic level.

"It's sort of like the difference between seeing Han Solo frozen in carbonite and watching him walk around blasting stormtroopers," said Deborah Kelly, an assistant professor at the VTC Research Institute and a lead author on the paper describing the first successful test of the new technique. "Seeing viruses, for example, in action in their natural environment is invaluable."

The technique involves taking two silicon-nitride microchips with windows etched in their centers and pressing them together until only a 150-nanometer space between them remains. The researchers then fill this pocket with a liquid resembling the natural environment of the biological structure to be imaged, creating a microfluidic chamber.

Then, because free-floating structures yield images with poor resolution, the researchers coat the microchip's interior surface with a layer of natural biological tethers, such as antibodies, which naturally grab onto a virus and hold it in place.

In a recent study in Lab on a Chip, Kelly joined Sarah McDonald, also an assistant professor at the VTC Research Institute, to prove that the technique works. McDonald provided a pure sample of rotavirus double-layered particles for the study.

"What's missing in the field of structural biology right now is dynamics -- how things move in time," said McDonald. "Debbie is developing technologies to bridge that gap, because that's clearly the next big breakthrough that structural biology needs."

Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea among infants and children. By the age of 5, nearly every child in the world has been infected at least once. And although the disease tends to be easily managed in the developed world, in developing countries rotavirus kills more than 450,000 children a year.

At the second step in the pathogen's life cycle, rotavirus sheds its outer layer, which allows it to enter a cell, and becomes what is called a double-layered particle. Once its second layer is exposed, the virus is ready to begin using the cell's own infrastructure to produce more viruses. It was the viral structure at this stage that the researchers imaged in the new study.

Kelly and McDonald coated the interior window of the microchip with antibodies to the virus. The antibodies, in turn, latched onto the rotaviruses that were injected into the microfluidic chamber and held them in place. The researchers then used a transmission electron microscope to image the prepared slide.

The technique worked perfectly.

The experiment gave results that resembled those achieved using traditional freezing methods to prepare rotavirus for electron microscopy, proving that the new technique can deliver accurate results.

"It's the first time scientists have imaged anything on this scale in liquid," said Kelly.

The next step is to continue to develop the technique with an eye toward imaging biological structures dynamically in action. Specifically, McDonald is looking to understand how rotavirus assembles, so as to better know and develop tools to combat this particular enemy of children's health.

The researchers said their ongoing collaboration is an example of the cross-disciplinary work that is becoming a hallmark of the VTC Research Institute.

"It's an ideal collaboration because Sarah provides a phenomenal model system by which we can develop new technologies to move the field of microstructural biology forward," said Kelly.

"It's very win-win," McDonald added. "While the virus is a great tool for Debbie to develop her techniques, her technology is critical for allowing me to understand how this deadly virus assembles and changes dynamically over time."

The paper "Visualizing viral assemblies in a nanoscale biosphere" was published online and will appear in a 2013 edition of Lab on a Chip.

The authors are Brian Gilmore, a research associate at the VTC Research Institute; Shannon Showalter, a research assistant at the VTC Research Institute; Madeline Dukes, an applications scientist at Protochips; Justin Tanner, a postdoctoral associate at the VTC Research Institute; Andrew Demmert, a student at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine; McDonald, in addition to her position at the VTC Research Institute, is an assistant professor of biomedical sciences and pathobiology in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine; and Kelly, in addition to her position at the VTC Research Institute, is an assistant professor of biological sciences in Virginia Tech's College of Science.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), via Newswise. The original article was written by Ken Kingery.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Brian L. Gilmore, Shannon P. Showalter, Madeline J. Dukes, Justin R. Tanner, Andrew C. Demmert, Sarah M. McDonald, Deborah F. Kelly. Visualizing viral assemblies in a nanoscale biosphere. Lab on a Chip, 2013; 13 (2): 216 DOI: 10.1039/C2LC41008G

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/5TCFMVlhxpI/121220143311.htm

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