C. African Republic council to pick interim leader

BANGUI, Central African Republic (AP) ? Central African Republic's self-appointed leader on Saturday announced the creation of a new council that will choose an interim president, a move aimed at placating the international community after he seized power by force two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the government reduced the hours of a curfew in place since the government's overthrow, even as gunfire crackled across the city of 700,000 after dark each night.

Michel Djotodia issued a presidential order setting up the council to lead a transitional government until elections can be held within 18 months. The announcement follows condemnation from the United States, which has failed to recognize his presidency.

Djotodia initially said he would rule until 2016, though later shortened the timeframe at the urging of heads of state from neighboring countries.

"The high council of transition will be tasked with electing a president of the republic, a head of state with a mandate of 18 months," Djotodia said in the edict.

The formation of the transition government though could further cement Djotodia's leadership as he is not barred from being among the candidates for the interim presidency.

"He is not excluded so I don't know why he couldn't run," Information Minister Christophe Gazam Betty said.

In December, Djotodia's fighters first began threatening to overthrow longtime President Francois Bozize, who himself seized power after a rebellion a decade ago.

Bozize and the rebels known as Seleka signed a peace accord in January to create a unity government along with the political opposition, though that deal came down amid accusations of mistrust and broken promises.

The rebels advanced on the capital on March 23, and Bozize fled into exile the following day as fighters took over the presidential palace.

The U.S. later said that the only "legitimate" leader in Central African Republic is the prime minister, an opposition figure appointed to the post as part of the January deal.

The body tasked with choosing an interim president will include nearly 100 participants, 10 of whom will come from Djotodia's Seleka alliance. Another six slots are going to the opposition, while nine seats are being given to Bozize allies.

It was not immediately clear how quickly the participants would choose a transitional leader, though the establishment of a selection process appears aimed at legitimizing and solidifying Djotodia's credentials as president.

Central African Republic has been wracked by a series of coups and rebellions since its independence from France in 1960. The country is rich in diamonds, gold and uranium through the chronic instability and lack of infrastructure has kept many foreign investors from working in the country.

Looters attacked the capital in the aftermath of Djotodia's ascension to power, targeting not only homes and businesses but also aid groups. A curfew remains in effect from midnight until 4 a.m., after two weeks of restricting people to their homes by 9 p.m.

___

Associated Press writer Jose Richard Pouamba contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/c-african-republic-council-pick-interim-leader-141920563.html

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State firms loom over Malaysian poll despite pledge to divest

By Stuart Grudgings and Siva Sithraputhran

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Wan Abdullah Wan Ibrahim, managing director of Malaysia's UEM Land's thought it was a "match made in heaven" when his state-linked property firm bought out Sunrise, a successful property developer owned by ethnic Chinese, in 2010.

Critics, however, saw it as a sign that Prime Minister Najib Razak's promise to roll back the state's overbearing influence in business and dismantle polices favoring ethnic Malays was already ringing hollow less than a year after it was made.

Najib will this month fight what is shaping up to be the closest election in Malaysia's 56-year post-colonial history. Despite his promise, state-controlled firms remain stubbornly dominant in Southeast Asia's third-largest economy and are even moving into new sectors like property.

Some high-profile government divestments turned Kuala Lumpur into Asia's IPO hotspot in 2012. But the enduring role of Malaysia's "GLCs" (government-linked companies) is stunting the private sector and entrenching an economic malaise dating back to Asia's 1997/98 financial crisis, according to a study by two Asian Development Bank (ADB) economists seen by Reuters.

"They can present evidence that they are divesting and yet move into new sectors and move vested interests to new opportunities," said Jayant Menon, one of the senior economists who wrote the report. "It's classic politics."

The GLCs are also central to policies favoring majority ethnic Malays over other races, including the economically dominant Chinese minority.

Najib wants to double Malaysians' incomes by 2020 but the economists' report is a sobering challenge to his contention that his government is breaking Malaysia out of its "middle-income trap".

"SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG THERE"

Najib acknowledged in 2010 that the state's overbearing influence on the economy was crimping Malaysia's growth and dynamism. He says the private sector must "return to the driver's seat" of the economy.

The government points to the $3.1 billion listing of palm oil firm Felda in 2012 and the $2.1 billion debut of IHH Healthcare as proof its plan to divest stakes in 33 firms is on track.

But critics point to an expansion of state involvement in other new areas, in particular the property sector, as evidence that vested interests within the bureaucracy and the ruling ethnic Malay party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), have pegged back Najib's early reform ambitions.

The ADB economists say in their report that, under Najib's rule, the real record on state firms was "more of a diversification than a divestment". It said the deterrent effect on private investment was contributing to Malaysia's status as the only major Southeast Asian nation with net capital outflows.

"What we do know is that investment has slumped in Malaysia, both foreign and domestic," said Menon.

"The fact is there is a net outflow of capital in a country that transformed itself with huge inflows in the past. Surely there is something terribly wrong there."

Private investment levels in Malaysia have picked up under Najib but have never fully recovered from the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s that signaled the end of rapid growth fuelled by exports and high foreign direct investment.

POLITICAL SETBACK

Najib dissolved parliament on April 3, paving the way for an election within weeks where he hopes to regain the two-thirds parliamentary majority the UMNO-led coalition lost for the first time in 2008. He came to power a year after that poll debacle.

In early 2010 he set out a transformative "New Economic Model", pledging the government would move away from being an "orchestrator" of the economy to being a "facilitator".

One stated goal of the planned 33 divestments is to help increase the share of national equity held by Malays to a long-held target of 30 percent. So far, 15 have been completed, but the pace slowed to four in 2012 from 11 in 2011.

Announcing the 2012 report card for his economic program last month, Najib hailed a 22 percent rise in private investment, compared with a 12 percent gain the previous year. That, however, includes spending by the GLCs.

Total committed investments under the program fell to 32 billion ringgit ($10.2 billion), down 82 percent from 179 billion ringgit in 2011. Foreign direct investment fell 26 percent to 29.1 billion ringgit in 2012.

GLCs play a big role across Malaysia's economy, taking up 56 percent of banking assets, 67 percent of the communication sector and 88 percent of utilities, according to the ADB.

Defined as companies with commercial goals but with some government control over decisions, they include Malaysia's two biggest banks, CIMB and Maybank.

Seven out of Malaysia's top 10 listed companies are majority-owned by the government, and GLCs make up about 36 percent of the stock market's capitalization.

"NATIONAL SERVICE"

Their political role has also been underlined in the run-up to the election, with Najib announcing that 40,000 employees of Telekom Malaysia and postal group Pos Malaysia would receive a 500 ringgit ($160) bonus.

He also authorized a 1,000 ringgit bonus for the 40,000 employees of state oil giant Petronas.

"They will think of it as a form of national service," an analyst with an investment bank in Kuala Lumpur, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said of the pre-election bonuses.

A flurry of recent moves by GLCs into Malaysia's property sector, like the $450 million Sunrise deal, has expanded the state's role in a sector traditionally dominated by Chinese business interests.

Teh Chi-Chang, director of the opposition-linked REFSA think tank, called them "backdoor nationalizations" that deter entrepreneurs in the sector.

In 2011, state investment firm Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) took a controlling stake in Malaysia's biggest property firm, SP Setia Berhad. State-controlled plantation Sime Darby became the largest shareholder in property developer E&O later that year.

The three-party opposition alliance, led by former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, has an outside chance of upsetting Najib's coalition, according to opinion polls. The alliance points to the expansion of state-linked firms as evidence Najib's reform agenda has stalled.

"Malaysia has one of the most vibrant private property sectors in the world and yet you have the government getting involved," said Tony Pua, a leading opposition politician.

"There's no point in having our GLCs competing on building luxury homes."

Malaysia's GLCs have increasingly gone international in their hunt for yield, despite the government's insistence that there are bountiful investment opportunities at home.

A consortium including Sime Darby, SP Setia, and Malaysia's Employees Provident Fund, bought Britain's Battersea power station for more than $600 million last year and plans to build luxury apartments on the site.

That helped put Malaysians ahead of Russian oligarchs and rich Chinese on the list of the biggest buyers of London property in the first seven months of 2012.

The government rejects accusations it is stifling enterprise in the property market, saying projects like a new publicly funded $8.4 billion financial exchange in the works in Kuala Lumpur will generate opportunities for companies.

Mohd Emir Mavani Abdullah, a director at the government's economic performance unit and a Felda board member, said the move into London property showed that government-linked firms were keen to avoid suffocating private firms at home.

The government also notes that many GLCs are strong performers, with the biggest 20 generating a compound annual return of 14.5 percent from May 2004 to April 2012, far outperforming the Kuala Lumpur market.

($1 = 3.125 ringgit)

(Additional reporting by Niki Koswanage; Editing by Paul Tait)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/state-firms-loom-over-malaysian-poll-despite-pledge-024715822--sector.html

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'Close your foreign accounts or be fired,' Putin tells Russian officials

The Russian president ordered all state officials to declare assets and divest foreign-held funds, in an apparent effort to tighten the Kremlin's controls and stem corruption.

By Fred Weir,?Correspondent / April 3, 2013

Russian President Vladimir Putin (l.) speaks with a student on a bus in Moscow on Monday. Mr. Putin issued a pair of decrees yesterday ordering Russian officials to declare and close any foreign assets they hold or else be fired.

Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Reuters

Enlarge

President Vladimir Putin has ordered all Russian officials to get rid of any bank accounts and financial securities they may hold abroad and bring them home to Russia by July 1, or face being fired.

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The two decrees, suddenly and unexpectedly issued by Mr. Putin on Tuesday, will oblige all state officials to declare assets and divest foreign-held funds, and are seen by many experts as a potentially significant new impetus in the Kremlin's declared struggle against corruption. ? ? ? ?

The new rules will strike a blow at the practice of "offshorization," in which cash earned in Russia is exported to overseas tax havens, as highlighted by the recent collapse of Cyprus as a key offshore zone for wealthy Russians. Analysts say that Russian officials, compelled to keep their money at home, will be more easily controlled by a Kremlin that has lately been cracking down on outside influences in a variety of ways, including forcing NGOs that obtain funding from abroad to self-declare as "foreign agents" to prohibiting US citizens from adopting Russian orphans.

"If someone has bank accounts abroad, we give them three months to get rid of them," Kremlin Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov told reporters.

"To own real estate abroad is not prohibited, but an applicant must declare it and specify the means he used to purchase it. An obvious consequence will follow if he fails to do this, which is dismissal due to loss of trust," Mr. Ivanov added.

Critics say that spiraling official corruption in Russia goes hand-in-hand with an attitude on the part of top bureaucrats that their time at the public trough is limited, and that they had better grab as much as possible and find ways to get it out of Russia.

"Putin's decrees are a purely political measure to make officials change their mentality in a positive way," says Kiril Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, a public organization.

"They have to stop thinking about their well-being as connected with assets abroad, and start thinking about how to make things work here in Russia. Putin wants the bureaucracy to be manageable, so he's trying to set things in order," he adds.

Russia ranked 133rd out of 174 countries in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by the Berlin-based Transparency International, putting it in company with Guyana, Honduras, and Iran.

The presidential decrees may also be Putin's way of nudging the State Duma to stop dragging its heels on a law submitted by the Kremlin earlier this year, covering the same ground, which deputies passed on first reading in February but have since failed to move forward with.

But the issue of deputies who keep secret assets abroad has been thrust into the public limelight by anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who caused the powerful head of the Duma's ethics committee, Vladimir Pekhtin, to resign last month, after property deeds and other documents posted by Mr. Navalny online showed that Mr. Pekhtin owned property in the US worth over $2 million.

"Putin had to act. Thanks to Navalny, this issue is now in the focus of public attention," says Dmitry Oreshkin, head of the Mercator Group, an independent Moscow-based media consultancy.

"Corruption is out of control, and it's the Frankenstein that Putin himself created. To limit it now will be difficult, even impossible," he says.

According to a March poll conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow, only 12 percent of Russians believe a law forbidding officials from holding assets abroad will work "in full." Another 41 percent think it will work "selectively," affecting some officials but not others. And 37 percent say that, like many such laws in the past, "it will be forgotten after a few months."

"Public opinion wants to see a struggle against corruption. People will like the sound of these measures," says Alexei Markarkin, director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow.

"But I'm doubtful there will be much impact. Maybe a few officials will quit, and go into private business. A few may be scapegoated, and blamed for all the evils. But most will likely experience no problems. The Kremlin may want to put a scare into officialdom, but it really doesn't want a full-blown conflict with the state bureaucracy. After all, that's the foundation of its power. Don't wait for the revolution to begin, because it's not going to."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Xoepcv_p8rw/Close-your-foreign-accounts-or-be-fired-Putin-tells-Russian-officials

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Google Opens Up Compute Engine To All Developers Who Buy Its $400/Month Gold Support Package, Drops Instance Prices By 4%

At last year’s Google I/O developer conference, Google launched Compute Engine, a cloud computing platform that allows developers to run their apps on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google’s massive infrastructure. This was a limited launch, however, and developers had to either get an invitation or go through Google’s sales teams to get access to this service. Starting today, developers who subscribe to Google’s $400 per month Gold Support package with 24/7 phone support can access Compute Engine without the need to talk to sales or an invitation. New Pricing The support package, of course, only gives developers the ability to use Compute Engine; they will still have to pay the usual usage-based fees to access the infrastructure. The good news is that with today’s announcement, Google is also dropping all of its instance prices by 4 percent (that’s after it already dropped storage prices by 20 percent last November). Pricing now starts at $0.132 per hour for the smallest virtual machine and currently tops out at $1.211 per hour for an eight-core machine with 52GB of memory and two 1,770GB hard drives (prices in Europe are somewhat higher). New Features Google is also adding a few new features and instance types to Compute Engine today. Developers can now, for example, use diskless versions of the standard instance types. Google also today introduced an improved administration console, and developers can now boot from persistent disks mounted as the root file system. Also new are two additional zones in Europe, which will “provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers.” You can read more about these feature updates here. Given Google’s infrastructure, Google’s Compute Engine has the potential to become one of Amazon’s strongest competitors in the cloud computing space, though Amazon currently offers a far wider range of services than Google. Chances are we will hear quite a bit more about Compute Engine at this year’s I/O, which is just a few weeks away, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is just using the $400 per month support package right now to ensure that it can scale the service once it opens up Compute Engine for everybody.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/GxH2VMFavq4/

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Weston finance board votes tonight on budget | The Weston Forum

The Weston Board of Finance? is scheduled to make a decision tonight, Thursday, April 4, on the final town, school, and capital budgets to send to the public for a vote.

The finance board meets at 8 p.m. in the Meeting Room at town hall.

A public hearing on the budget proposals was held Wednesday, April 3. Coverage of that meeting, as well as of the finance baord?s deliberation meeting, will be in next week?s April 11 edition of The Weston Forum.

On the table are a town operating budget of $11,690,441 (a 3.32% increase over the current year), a $46.29-million school budget (a 1.55% increase), and a combined $1,128,728 town and school capital budget (a 30.2% decrease).

The Board of Selectmen approved the town, capital, and debt service requests and recommended a $100,000 reduction to the school budget request. The selectmen?s school budget recommendation puts it at a 1.31% increase from the current operating budget.

More school reductions

However, the school board met last week, on Thursday, March 28, and discussed making even more reductions to its already-approved budget request. As a result, the school board is expected to ask the finance board for an even lower school budget: $45,765,418 ? $528,250 less than originally requested, and $178,226 more than the current budget. The new request is a 0.39% increase from the current budget.

A press release from the school district said, ?This lower budget was based on aggressive re-bidding of the employee health benefits and several other cost saving strategies? since the school board voted on its budget proposal.

When it voted Feb. 1, the district was estimating the cost for health insurance because insurance bids had not yet come back. The bid results, however, led the schools to change carriers, resulting in a $438,307 savings.

Other changes that have occurred since Feb. 1 and their corresponding savings include:

? An additional retirement ($44,576).

? Reduction of a full-time teaching position to a 0.6 full-time equivalent, or FTE, ($24,730).

? A change in the technology lease ($15,294).

? Received quote on liability, auto, and property insurance ($5,343).

Finance board authority

The finance board has the authority to reduce or increase the town and/or the school budgets, but it has line item control only over the town budget; it is up to the school district to decide how the money ultimately approved is spent.

The amounts approved will go before voters at the Annual Town Budget Meeting (ATBM), set for Wednesday, April 24, at 8 p.m. in the Weston High School auditorium.

According to the new town charter, the budgets may not be increased by the ATBM. Also, a minimum of 2% of all the town?s qualified voters must be present at the ATBM in order to reduce any portion of the budget; if that quorum exists, reductions must be approved by a majority present at the ATBM.

The budgets approved at the ATBM go to a machine referendum vote for final approval.

Machine votes may be cast at the high school immediately following the ATBM, as well as the following Thursday, May 2, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the Weston Middle School gymnasium.

Source: http://www.thewestonforum.com/9613/weston-finance-board-votes-tonight-on-budget/

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The Remarkable Biodiversity Of Belly Buttons

Rob Dunn, science writer and biologist, North Carolina State University and author of The Wild Life of Our Bodies

Scientists at the Belly Button Biodiversity Project wanted to engage the public. They started to culture the bacteria in people's navels as a way to remind them about the life living on their bodies. In the process, they discovered diverse organisms, some of them completely new to science.

Copyright ? 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

Our fascination with the belly button fades after a certain age, maybe eight years old. But after some serious navel gazing, researchers have reignited interest. It turns out that like our fingerprints, retinal patterns and our DNA, our belly buttons may be unique because of the mix of bacteria found therein. Rob Dunn is a science writer and a biologist at North Carolina State University where he works with the Belly Button Biodiversity Project. He's also the author of "The Wild Life of Our Bodies" and joins us now by phone from the Nature Research Center in Raleigh. Good of you to be with us today.

ROB DUNN: Oh, thanks for having me. It's a delight.

CONAN: And I - your website says you approach navels like an explorer approaches a new world.

DUNN: Well, so I started my career working in tropical forests and one of the things I realized, sort of midway through is that there is all kinds of stuff in our daily lives that we understood almost nothing about and it was far cheaper to go find belly buttons than it was to get to far-away rainforests. And they've proven to be equally interesting.

CONAN: Biodiversity, we keep hearing about it in the rainforest.

DUNN: Yeah. And we have it on our scan in our houses and even on our belly buttons too. And so the average belly button, we're finding tens of species of bacteria and other organisms. And across a group of people, we find thousands of kinds of bacteria living in belly buttons, and also all over the skin more generally.

CONAN: And I gather some rather exotic types of bacteria.

DUNN: We do. So I mean, one of the interesting things about our skin is that we treat our skin in a very different way today than we would have a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. And so, there's the potential for us to have changed what lives on us pretty dramatically.

And one of the fun things in this study so far is we had one individual who claimed to have never washed, and that he had many, many bacteria species in his belly button. But he also had an entirely different lineage of life called the Archeans that we usually think of as being in deep sea vents and other sort of far away realms. But it turns out they also live in belly buttons, and we're looking at armpits now too. We actually found some of these in armpits as well. And so...

CONAN: I hesitate to say those could be extreme environments too.

DUNN: The nice thing about working with the public is we can get people to sample their own parts. They don't pay us well enough to sample other people's armpits, I think.

CONAN: Well, as you suggest, a lot of us have changed hygienic habits over the past couple of centuries, in particular. Belly buttons though, don't seem to get cleaned as thoroughly is what you're saying.

DUNN: Yeah. I mean, they're kind of a nature reserve when it comes to our body. And so I think that the better indication of, you know, what our body is like in terms of microbes and those places we don't scrub all the time. You know, our hands are covered with lots of species, but those include both the things that are good at dealing with soap and the things we've just encountered, whereas, the belly button is kind of a little bit more unreserved. We very rarely shake belly buttons with people that we often shake hands. It makes a difference.

(LAUGHTER)

CONAN: I could understand that. So as you explore the life of the belly button, one of the things, of course, that it points out is we think of bacteria and react in horror. Of course, we can't live without them. They are our partners in life.

DUNN: Yeah, that's right. So, if you really scraped all of the life off of your skin, all of the bacteria and Archaea and nematodes and everything else, you would almost certainly die from pathogens. Your bacteria are your first line of defense. And they also do all sorts of other things. And so all of the smells you attribute to other people, those are almost exclusively microbial. And so that includes the bad smells but also the good smells.

And so the line between us and them is very fuzzy, but we don't really understand it very much about, you know, why you have a specific set of microbes in your belly button and I have another set, and how we might alter that trajectory so as to produce, you know, sets of belly button bacteria that are more beneficial or smell nicer or whatever else. And the first stage is really just figuring out who's there. And so it's kind of like Lewis and Clark work, you know, without all the hazards.

CONAN: We're talking with Rob Dunn; is a biologist and writer for the Department of Biology in North Carolina State University where he works at the Belly Button Biodiversity Project. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And how do people react when you tell them you work for the Belly Button Biodiversity Project?

DUNN: Well, I think it's a mix. So we try to make all of our work as public as possible. And so, for example, you can go to our website and you can find all of the data we have so far. And you can actually contribute or own hypothesis as to what explain differences from one person to the next.

And so we get a lot of interest that they engage to people who want to help us with the mysteries that are emerging with these microbes. We also get lots of teachers who are - who want to be involved, and then we get a fair number of emails with people sending us pictures we probably don't really want to see if their husband or wife's belly button and something that's growing in it. So it's mixed response I guess.

(LAUGHTER)

CONAN: I suspect that's a good way to put it. There was a fascinating finding in one of your subjects, someone who had bacterium that had previously only been found in soil in Japan, and he had never been to Japan.

DUNN: Yeah. I mean, it's one of the amazing things is that we know so little about the microbes that are all around us. Often we'll find something that can actually be quite common on someone. And it's the first time we've have really seen it or has only seen it in really extreme places. And so - then we just have those two data points, and so it's hard to know what to make of that.

And as another example, one of the samples from me, I had microbes that tend to be associated with pesticides. And so it's hard to know just from that one sample what does that mean? But it invites more study, so that, you know, whether I bumped into a plant that was covered in pesticides? It's some daily thing, you know, I'm doing, exposing me to more than I would like?

And, you know, it's all the questions we would ask of - about a forest, we can ask about our own bodies, we can ask about our homes. And so as a scientist, it's actually a really exciting time to be able to go into these habitats. I think medically, as a human - and this is why we get the emails - it's also really frustrating if you then have a problem that emerges from having, you know, not the right kinds of bacteria on your body or a pathogen or not enough species if you feel desperate enough to send a scientist the picture of your belly button.

CONAN: Well, in the rainforest you expect to a find a species, beetles previously unknown to science. Are you finding bacteria previously unknown to science?

DUNN: Yes. So the way we study these bacteria is by looking at their genes. And many of the, sort of, letters of these genes that we see, no ones ever seen before. And so we're finding not only whole new species in belly buttons but whole new lineages. And so then the study of those lineages begins, sort of, from stage one. You know, they don't have names even their families often don't have names. And so it's really a pretty amazing time. I think it's very easy to imagine that we understand most of what's living around us.

But the truth is if, you know, when you're in your house or your studio, in that house or studio with you are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of species, most of which no ones ever, every studied.

CONAN: I wonder, some people - there is now a class people who go into belly buttons as a daily practice, laparoscopic surgeons. Have you spoken with them about what they find in people's belly buttons?

DUNN: So I've received a few emails but we haven't actually sampled any laparoscopic - well, we don' know if we've sampled any belly buttons that have had laparoscopic surgery. We probably actually have. But we do hear lots of anecdotes about belly buttons that we didn't know before.

For example, it turns out that in Japan, traditionally, mothers tell their children to never wash their belly button or they'll get a stomach ache, which is actually an interesting sort of metaphorical concepts for some of what we're thinking about in terms of health of microbes and your skin. You know, we would urge people not to be so hyper clean in their lives that they both get rid of the bad bacteria and the good ones. And so Japanese mothers seem to have known quite a bit.

CONAN: I suspect that's true, and I suspect they're not shy about telling their children about it either.

DUNN: That seems to be the case.

CONAN: Thanks very much for being with us today.

DUNN: Thank you so much, Neal. Keep an eye on your belly button.

CONAN: Rob Dunn is a science writer, a biologist in the Department of Biology at North Carolina State University. He joined us today from Raleigh. Tomorrow, traffic. L.A.'s is legendary, they're trying something new. They have synchronized every traffic light in the city. Join us for an update with Tom Vanderbilt tomorrow right after I go home and take a shower. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

Copyright ? 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/04/03/176145197/the-remarkable-biodiversity-of-belly-buttons?ft=1&f=1007

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Climate Change Future Suggested by Looking Back 4 Million Years

The last time the Earth enjoyed greenhouse gas levels like those of today was roughly four million years ago, during an era known as the Pliocene. The extra heat of average temperatures as much as 4 degrees Celsius warmer turned the tropical oceans into a nice warm pool of bathwater, as noted by new research published in Nature on April 5.

By analyzing the ratio of magnesium and calcium in the shells of microscopic animals found in long cores of mud from the deep ocean, the researchers confirmed this massive oceanic warm pool. At about 28 degrees C, the surface sea temperatures were not much warmer than today's tropical oceans, but these warm waters covered much more of the global ocean surface. Although such warm water might sound nice, such warm pools of water have profound weather effects; think of El Nino events in the present and the torrential rains this climate pattern creates in some areas. And a Pliocene-like reduction in temperature differences between polar and mid-latitude regions would have similarly profound effects on everything from the number of tropical cyclones in the Pacific Ocean to which areas are covered by desert in Africa, Australia and North America. The warm water conditions of the Pliocene held steady for more than one million years. In fact, scientists do not understand completely what caused these conditions to change, though a decrease in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of roughly 100 parts-per-million, to around 300 ppm probably helped. In the last few hundred years, that's about how much humanity has raised greenhouse gas concentrations through the burning of fossil fuels, the cutting down of forests and other activities. Today's concentration is about 394 ppm. Although we cannot be sure that a similarly sized decrease in greenhouse gas concentrations ushered in the present era of ice ages singlehandedly, we can be sure that greenhouse gases change climate. And, unless we want to go back to the Pliocene when our distant ancestors split from chimpanzees, we might want to temper climate change by emitting less CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-future-suggested-looking-back-4-million-173300533.html

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