BRUSSELS (AP) ? Hard-fought deals on the European Union budget and future bank bailouts gave EU leaders a boost going into a summit Thursday, injecting fresh credibility into their efforts to end a spiral of financial and economic troubles.
Despite the progress already made Thursday, the EU's 27 leaders were still at odds over how to step up the fight against unemployment, with a German-led group calling for structural reforms and others saying more spending was needed to kickstart growth.
"I wish this to be a summit to tackle youth unemployment, a summit for growth and jobs," said French President Francois Hollande in Brussels as he headed into two days of talks with his counterparts. "Frankly, that is what Europeans expect."
Unemployment is at a record high of 11 percent for the EU and 12.2 percent for the 17 member countries that use the euro.
It is far worse for the young who have been disproportionately punished by years of crisis and recession. Latest figures show almost one in four people aged under 25 in the EU are unemployed. In Greece and Spain, that rate has it hit more than 50 percent.
"It is simply unacceptable that young people should be paying with their life chances for a crisis for which they are entirely blameless," European Parliament President Martin Schulz told the leaders.
His comments echoed President Barack Obama, who warned the EU on a visit to Germany last week of losing a generation if overly high youth unemployment can't be tackled.
But Germany, Europe's reluctant paymaster, again dashed hopes of investing any new money to ease the problem.
"The German government insists that the problems of Europe and the eurozone have to be tackled at the root and solved step by step," Chancellor Angela Merkel said ahead of the summit. Spending more won't solve the problems, she insisted.
British Prime Minister David Cameron ruled out more government aid, insisting instead that Europe must do what "we're doing in Britain, which is getting control of spending, making sure we live within our means and then making ourselves more competitive."
The summit discussions taking stock of progress on the bloc's financial and economic policies come just hours after two breakthrough deals.
Early Thursday, the heads of the European Commission and European Parliament overcame months of divisions over a new seven-year, 960 billion euro ($1.3 trillion) budget that will finance EU projects through 2020.
The agreement was rapidly backed by Parliament's main caucus leaders, setting the stage for a swift approval vote.
The budget, which includes the first cuts to EU spending in its history, determines what the EU can spend on common infrastructure like railway or road projects, farming subsidies and aid to poor countries. It's separate from national budgets ? and much smaller.
Crucially, the EU budget also includes money for the employment measures that EU leaders debate at this week's summit. No budget agreement would have meant no money for those projects.
The leaders' flagship unemployment policy is a pledge made last year to spend 6 billion euros getting young people back to work, starting in 2014. Half of that money, however, is only being repackaged from other existing budget projects.
"That is not an absolutely impressive figure, but it's a start," acknowledged Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker.
Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann was blunter, saying "we need more funds to fight youth unemployment."
"Without investment ... and pushing for stronger economic cooperation, without orienting budgets toward investment and implementing stimulus packages in specific countries, and joint ones, without that - you can't restart growth," Faymann said.
With significant stimulus policies off the table, leaders were instead touting a previously agreed capital increase for the European Investment Bank, which should boost lending to small and medium-sized companies in crisis-hit nations and foster job creation.
Thursday's deal on the budget came only hours after EU finance ministers reached a deal determining who will take losses on future bank bailouts, so that taxpayers don't have to. That is a key step toward establishing a so-called banking union for Europe, aimed at restoring stability after a tumultuous few years that have dragged down the global economy.
The set of rules determines the order in which investors and creditors will have to take losses when a bank is restructured or shut down, with a taxpayer-funded bailout being only a limited last resort.
A year ago, EU leaders pledged to tackle the eurozone's financial crisis by introducing a banking union. That would hand the supervision and rescue of banks to European institutions rather than leaving weaker member states to fend for themselves.
The project has stalled on many fronts, notably because richer countries fear they might have to pay for the banking woes of weaker countries. But Thursday's breakthrough offered new hope by establishing clear rules.
The new rules foresee for banks' creditors and shareholders to be the first to take losses. But if that isn't enough to prop up the lender, small companies and ordinary savers holding uninsured deposits worth more than 100,000 euros ($132,000) will also take a hit.
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Raf Casert and Sylvain Plazy in Brussels and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.
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Follow Juergen Baetz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jbaetz
June 26, 2013 ? You say tomato, I say comparative transcriptomics. Researchers in the U.S., Europe and Japan have produced the first comparison of both the DNA sequences and which genes are active, or being transcribed, between the domestic tomato and its wild cousins.
The results give insight into the genetic changes involved in domestication and may help with future efforts to breed new traits into tomato or other crops, said Julin Maloof, professor of plant biology in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Maloof is senior author on the study, published June 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For example, breeding new traits into tomatoes often involves crossing them with wild relatives. The new study shows that a large block of genes from one species of wild tomato is present in domestic tomato, and has widespread, unexpected effects across the whole genome.
Maloof and colleagues studied the domestic tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, and wild relatives S. pennellii, S. habrochaites and S. pimpinellifolium. Comparison of the plants' genomes shows the effects of evolutionary bottlenecks, Maloof noted -- for example at the original domestication in South America, and later when tomatoes were brought to Europe for cultivation.
Among other findings, genes associated with fruit color showed rapid evolution among domesticated, red-fruited tomatoes and green-fruited wild relatives. And S. pennellii, which lives in desert habitats, had accelerated evolution in genes related to drought tolerance, heat and salinity.
New technology is giving biologists the unprecedented ability to look at all the genes in an organism, not just a select handful. The researchers studied not just the plants' DNA but also the messenger RNA being transcribed from different genes. RNA transcription is the process that transforms information in genes into action. If the DNA sequence is the list of parts for making a tomato plant, the messenger RNA transcripts are the step-by-step instructions.
Gene-expression profiling, combined with an understanding of the plants' biology, allows researchers to understand how genes interact to create complex phenotypes, said Neelima Sinha, professor of plant biology at UC Davis and co-author on the paper.
"Genomics has fast-tracked previous gene-by-gene analyses that took us years to complete," she said.
"We could not have done a study like this ten years ago -- certainly not on any kind of reasonable budget," Maloof said. "It opens up a lot of new things we can do as plant scientists."
Stratasys, an Israeli-based 3D printer and additive manufacturer has just agreed to acquire 3D printing company MakerBot for a proposed amount of $403 million in stock. They've announced a "definitive merger agreement" where MakerBot would converge with a subsidiary of Stratasys in a stock-for-stock transaction. After selling more than 22,000 3D printers since its inception in 2009, MakerBot is seen as a leader and pioneer in the 3D printing space, and about 11,000 of those sales were due to the Replicator 2 alone. MakerBot will operate as a separate entity with its own branding and marketing as part of the deal, and will provide an affordable 3D printing market for Stratasys. If all goes well with the regulators, it should be done by the third quarter of 2013.
President Barack Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, Monday, June 17, 2013. Obama and Putin discussed the ongoing conflict in Syria during their bilateral meeting. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Barack Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, Monday, June 17, 2013. Obama and Putin discussed the ongoing conflict in Syria during their bilateral meeting. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, left, shakes hands with US President Barack Obama during arrivals for the G-8 summit at the Lough Erne Golf Resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland on Monday, June 17, 2013. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland (AP) ? Hunting for a glimmer of common ground, the leaders of major economic powers are declaring themselves dedicated to a political solution to Syria's bloody civil war, even as President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin stake out diametrically opposite stands on which side deserves military support.
Ahead of a Group of Eight joint statement on Syria to be issued Tuesday, the U.S. remained committed to Obama's recent decision to arm the rebels and Russia did not budge from its weapons sales to President Bashar Assad's regime.
Yet even as Obama found common ground among European allies against Putin at a G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, the U.S. president also struggled to convince some of those same allies to join him in sending armaments to the Syrian opposition.
Syria, where at least 93,000 people have been killed in the conflict, has emerged as one of the intractable issues at the G-8 in Northern Ireland, where leaders of eight of the wealthiest economies gathered at a gleaming lakeside golf resort to hash over trade, tax and foreign policy challenges.
"Of course, our opinions do not coincide, but all of us have the intention to stop the violence in Syria, to stop the growth of victims, and to solve the situation peacefully," Putin said after meeting for two hours with Obama. "We agreed to push the parties to the negotiations table."
"We do have differing perspectives on the problem," Obama concurred. "But we share an interest in reducing the violence; securing chemical weapons and ensuring that they're neither used nor are they subject to proliferation; and that we want to try to resolve the issue through political means, if possible."
In an interview on PBS that was taped Sunday and aired late Monday, Obama was much blunter, and pessimistic.
"What's been clear is that Assad, at this point ? in part, because of his support from Iran and from Russia ? believes that he does not have to engage in a political transition, believes that he can continue to simply violently suppress over half of the population," Obama told interviewer Charlie Rose. "And as long as he's got that mindset, it's going to be very difficult to resolve the situation there."
Even so, Obama in the interview portrayed himself as a reluctant participant in the civil war.
"We know what it's like to rush into a war in the Middle East without having thought it through," he said in obvious reference to the war in Iraq.
British officials said Cameron was looking for consensus among the G-8 members on five areas of potential agreement that could win Russian support, including securing chemical weapons, pursuing extremists and creating an executive authority for Syria after it undergoes a political transition.
But despite their shared belief that Assad must leave power, the U.S., Britain and France were also showing cracks in their unity. Britain and France appear unwilling ? at least for now ? to join President Barack Obama in arming the Syrian rebels, a step the U.S. president reluctantly finalized last week.
Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, downplayed those differences, saying the Syrian opposition could be strengthened either politically, through humanitarian aid or as a military force.
"Different nations are going to feed into that process in different ways," he said.
The G-8 leaders capped the day Monday with a dinner at a lakeside lodge, where Syria was to be the main subject as they dined on Kilkeel crab, prawn and avocado salad, followed by roast fillet and braised shin of Kettyle beef with violet artichokes. Dessert was Bushmills whiskey custard.
The sensitive Syria discussions unfolded in the midst of awkward revelations that the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ tapped into the communications of foreign diplomats during the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London, including those of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev. That report, in the newspaper The Guardian, came on the heels of reports about the high-tech surveillance methods and record-gathering employed by the National Security Agency in the United States.
While the disclosures added a layer of controversy to the summit, U.S. officials said heads of state at a summit like the G-8 are perfectly aware that such spying goes on. As for the issue coming up in talks with Putin, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters, "It was a non-event at this meeting."
Indeed, in his interview with PBS, Obama made it clear such eavesdropping is commonplace, and tried to distinguish it from the cyber-hacking his administration has accused China of carrying out.
"There is a big difference between China wanting to figure out how can they find out what my talking points are when I'm meeting with the Japanese, which is standard fare, and we try to prevent them from penetrating that, and they try to get that information," he said. "There's a big difference between that and a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple's software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product. That's theft."
It was a remarkably direct accusation coming just a week after Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a desert resort in California.
"We had a very blunt conversation about cybersecurity," Obama said of his talks with Xi.
With Putin, Obama also tried to emphasize their areas of cooperation, including an extension of a 1992 agreement designed to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons. The agreement resolved Russian concerns that the original post-Soviet pact, named after Senate sponsors Democrat Sam Nunn and Republican Richard Lugar, was too intrusive in securing material from Russia. Rhodes said the deal allows both countries to cooperate on nuclear security in the U.S. and Russia, but also in other countries. Obama is likely to draw attention to the deal in a speech Wednesday in Berlin.
Still, relations between Obama and Putin have never been warm. Rhodes called the encounter between the two "businesslike," one made even more stilted through translation.
Obama tried to leaven their joint appearance before reporters at the end of their talks by observing that "we compared notes on President Putin's expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball. And we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover."
Putin, through an interpreter, replied, "The President wants to relax me with his statement of age."
___
Associated Press writers Cassandra Vinograd and Julie Pace in Northern Ireland contributed to this report.
Molecular imaging improves care for children with brain cancerPublic release date: 10-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Susan Martonik smartonik@snmmi.org 703-652-6773 Society of Nuclear Medicine
Pediatric PET imaging of gliomas gets a boost with an easier-to-manufacture imaging agent
Vancouver, British Columbia A relatively new weapon in the fight against childhood brain cancer has emerged that improves upon standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by providing information about tumor metabolism and extent of cancer in children diagnosed with glioma, a growth caused by the abnormal division of glial cells in the brain, say researchers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging's 2013 Annual Meeting.
Brain cancer imaging is often conducted with conventional MRI, but there are some limitations to this imaging technique. This type of cancer accounts for approximately 80 percent of all invasive brain tumors and develops in the brain's glial cells that protect and maintain a state of neural equilibrium. Conventional MRI can sometimes over- or underestimate the extent of these tumors and the exact shape of their outlying margins. A method of molecular imaging called positron emission tomography (PET), which provides information about physiological functions rather than structures of the brain, can be performed with a variety of imaging agents that bind to specific cellular systems to image gliomas. Two of the main types of brain imaging agents used for this purpose provide information about either glucose, or sugar, metabolism of cells or the cellular metabolism of amino acids, the brick-and-mortar components of proteins used by tissues, especially rapidly growing so-called neoplastic tumors.
Amino acid PET imaging has been shown to be better for detection of neoplastic tissue and treatment monitoring in cases of brain cancer than glucose imaging. In general, the brain requires more glucose than the body's other tissues and organs, making brain scans "noisier" and less defined than others due to this increase in overall cellular metabolism, whereas areas of increased amino acid activity show up clearly on scans as a visual "hot spot." This study focuses on a particular amino acid imaging agent, O-(2-[18F]-fluoroethyl)-L-tyrosine (F-18 FET), and its diagnostic benefit for imaging pediatric gliomas when conventional MRI cannot make out a clear picture of disease.
"Cancer of the brain and spinal cord are common in children and young adults, and caring for this particular group can be challenging because choice of treatment depends on specific information about the tumor. Tumors in younger patients show a greater variety in both type and size, and in many cases the tumors are located near critical brain structures that prohibit surgical removal," said Veronika Dunkl, MD, a research scientist at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Forschungszentrum Jlich, in Jlich, Germany. "In patients with brain tumors, contrast-enhanced structural MRI is currently the diagnostic method of choice. However, in youths with newly diagnosed cerebral lesions thought to be brain tumors, MRI's ability to identify neoplastic tissue or tumor progression and recurrence after treatment is limited. F-18 FET is complementary and can potentially improve diagnosis and treatment of pediatric brain tumors."
Pediatric brain imaging with PET and F-18 FET can be used not only to evaluate extent of tumors but also to help doctors plan for biopsy, surgery and radiation therapies and track response to therapy and recurrence of tumors after completion of a treatment cycle.
F-18 FET is also unique from other amino acid PET agents because the production of the drug can be centrally located and distributed by a radiopharmacy, whereas other amino acidbased PET agents must be produced by an on-site cyclotrona massive particle accelerator that bombards particles with a target used to radiolabel the agent's molecular compound. For F-18 FET, it is the amino acid tyrosine that allows brain cells to signal each other. The greater logistical ease of F-18 FET is due to its radioactive half-life of approximately 110 minutes, whereas many other isotopes have a half-life of only about 20 minutes and must be administered for patient imaging almost immediately.
For this study, 15 young patients suspected of glioma cerebral cancer via MRI screening underwent PET imaging with the guidance of F-18 FET. This molecular imaging technique was found to be highly effective, about 87 percent, for detecting and differentiating brain lesions in children and young adults. The method was able to pinpoint 11 out of 12 brain lesions correctly as tumors and 2 out of 3 as a non-tumorous growth. Repeated PET imaging (17 scans) for seven more pediatric patients provided meaningful information about cancer progression or remission. F-18 FET imaging was able to detect residual tumor and tumor progression in 5 out of 6 scans, and in 11 scans in which the cancer had been eradicated, for a 94 percent rate of accuracy.
"Results of the present study may improve the clinical management of this vulnerable patient population significantly, especially when a decision for further treatment is difficult or impossible on the basis of conventional MRI alone," said Dunkl.
The National Cancer Institute estimates that brain cancers are among the most common cancers in child populations. Incidence of pediatric brain tumors is approximately 3.2 cases per 100,000 people.
###
Scientific Paper 474: Veronika Dunkl, Gabriele Stoffels, Gereon Fink, Nadim J. Shah, Heinz Coenen, Karl-Josef Langen and Norbert Galldiks, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Forschungszentrum Jlich, Jlich, Germany; Corvin Cleff, Department of Neurology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany; and Sevgi Sarikaya-Seiwert, Department of Neurosurgery, University of Dsseldorf, Dsseldorf, Germany, "The use of dynamic O-(2-[18F]fluoroethyl)-L-tyrosine-PET in the clinical evaluation of brain tumors in children and young adults," SNMMI's 60th Annual Meeting, June 8, 2013, Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Molecular imaging improves care for children with brain cancerPublic release date: 10-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Susan Martonik smartonik@snmmi.org 703-652-6773 Society of Nuclear Medicine
Pediatric PET imaging of gliomas gets a boost with an easier-to-manufacture imaging agent
Vancouver, British Columbia A relatively new weapon in the fight against childhood brain cancer has emerged that improves upon standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by providing information about tumor metabolism and extent of cancer in children diagnosed with glioma, a growth caused by the abnormal division of glial cells in the brain, say researchers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging's 2013 Annual Meeting.
Brain cancer imaging is often conducted with conventional MRI, but there are some limitations to this imaging technique. This type of cancer accounts for approximately 80 percent of all invasive brain tumors and develops in the brain's glial cells that protect and maintain a state of neural equilibrium. Conventional MRI can sometimes over- or underestimate the extent of these tumors and the exact shape of their outlying margins. A method of molecular imaging called positron emission tomography (PET), which provides information about physiological functions rather than structures of the brain, can be performed with a variety of imaging agents that bind to specific cellular systems to image gliomas. Two of the main types of brain imaging agents used for this purpose provide information about either glucose, or sugar, metabolism of cells or the cellular metabolism of amino acids, the brick-and-mortar components of proteins used by tissues, especially rapidly growing so-called neoplastic tumors.
Amino acid PET imaging has been shown to be better for detection of neoplastic tissue and treatment monitoring in cases of brain cancer than glucose imaging. In general, the brain requires more glucose than the body's other tissues and organs, making brain scans "noisier" and less defined than others due to this increase in overall cellular metabolism, whereas areas of increased amino acid activity show up clearly on scans as a visual "hot spot." This study focuses on a particular amino acid imaging agent, O-(2-[18F]-fluoroethyl)-L-tyrosine (F-18 FET), and its diagnostic benefit for imaging pediatric gliomas when conventional MRI cannot make out a clear picture of disease.
"Cancer of the brain and spinal cord are common in children and young adults, and caring for this particular group can be challenging because choice of treatment depends on specific information about the tumor. Tumors in younger patients show a greater variety in both type and size, and in many cases the tumors are located near critical brain structures that prohibit surgical removal," said Veronika Dunkl, MD, a research scientist at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Forschungszentrum Jlich, in Jlich, Germany. "In patients with brain tumors, contrast-enhanced structural MRI is currently the diagnostic method of choice. However, in youths with newly diagnosed cerebral lesions thought to be brain tumors, MRI's ability to identify neoplastic tissue or tumor progression and recurrence after treatment is limited. F-18 FET is complementary and can potentially improve diagnosis and treatment of pediatric brain tumors."
Pediatric brain imaging with PET and F-18 FET can be used not only to evaluate extent of tumors but also to help doctors plan for biopsy, surgery and radiation therapies and track response to therapy and recurrence of tumors after completion of a treatment cycle.
F-18 FET is also unique from other amino acid PET agents because the production of the drug can be centrally located and distributed by a radiopharmacy, whereas other amino acidbased PET agents must be produced by an on-site cyclotrona massive particle accelerator that bombards particles with a target used to radiolabel the agent's molecular compound. For F-18 FET, it is the amino acid tyrosine that allows brain cells to signal each other. The greater logistical ease of F-18 FET is due to its radioactive half-life of approximately 110 minutes, whereas many other isotopes have a half-life of only about 20 minutes and must be administered for patient imaging almost immediately.
For this study, 15 young patients suspected of glioma cerebral cancer via MRI screening underwent PET imaging with the guidance of F-18 FET. This molecular imaging technique was found to be highly effective, about 87 percent, for detecting and differentiating brain lesions in children and young adults. The method was able to pinpoint 11 out of 12 brain lesions correctly as tumors and 2 out of 3 as a non-tumorous growth. Repeated PET imaging (17 scans) for seven more pediatric patients provided meaningful information about cancer progression or remission. F-18 FET imaging was able to detect residual tumor and tumor progression in 5 out of 6 scans, and in 11 scans in which the cancer had been eradicated, for a 94 percent rate of accuracy.
"Results of the present study may improve the clinical management of this vulnerable patient population significantly, especially when a decision for further treatment is difficult or impossible on the basis of conventional MRI alone," said Dunkl.
The National Cancer Institute estimates that brain cancers are among the most common cancers in child populations. Incidence of pediatric brain tumors is approximately 3.2 cases per 100,000 people.
###
Scientific Paper 474: Veronika Dunkl, Gabriele Stoffels, Gereon Fink, Nadim J. Shah, Heinz Coenen, Karl-Josef Langen and Norbert Galldiks, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Forschungszentrum Jlich, Jlich, Germany; Corvin Cleff, Department of Neurology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany; and Sevgi Sarikaya-Seiwert, Department of Neurosurgery, University of Dsseldorf, Dsseldorf, Germany, "The use of dynamic O-(2-[18F]fluoroethyl)-L-tyrosine-PET in the clinical evaluation of brain tumors in children and young adults," SNMMI's 60th Annual Meeting, June 8, 2013, Vancouver, British Columbia.
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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.
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