Obamas, Bidens, To visit New Hampshire After Convention

President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden’s wife Jill at the White …
 
This should banish any doubt that New Hampshire matters in November: President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. 

Jill Biden will all attend a campaign rally in the Granite State the day after the Democratic convention, next Friday.
It's unusual for both couples to attend the same campaign event. The president will accept the Democratic nomination on Thursday night in Charlotte, N.C.
Obama will go to Florida the following Saturday and Sunday, while Biden will stump for votes in Ohio.

Mark Cuban To Investors: Don’t Blame Facebook Because You Willingly Paid $38 For Its Shares

Famed American business magnate Mark Cuban has some sharp words for investors who bought Facebook (FB) shares on their first day of trading and are now crying about the company’s plummeting stock. In a post on his personal Blog Maverick page, Cuban says that investors should have absolutely known what they were getting into when they plunged their money into yet another risky tech IPO and added that it’s wrong to blame Facebook for charging $38 per share when people were willing to pay for it.

“Facebook was able to raise about 10 BILLION DOLLARS in this IPO,” Cuban writes. “The CFO’s job is not to manage shareholder portfolios. His job is to help Facebook succeed. I don’t know about you, but putting 10 BILLION DOLLARS in the bank in my opinion is one way to help them succeed.”

Cuban also discloses that he bought some Facebook shares early on, figured out they were going to hurt his portfolio, and promptly dumped them back on the market.

“When the stock didn’t bounce as I thought/hoped it would, I realized I was wrong and got out,” he writes. “It wasn’t the fault of the FB CFO that I lost money. It was my fault. I know that no one sells me shares of stock because they expect the price of the stock to go up.”

Nokia's Slide Continues After Windows 8 Launch

HELSINKI (AP) — Nokia Corp.'s share price is continuing to fall after the unveiling of the company's first Windows Phone 8 smartphones failed to impress markets and analysts.

In Helsinki, its stock dropped as much as 4 percent on the open Thursday after the previous day's launch caused it to tumble more than 13 percent. In New York, Nokia shares fell 45 cents to $2.38 on Wednesday, trading at the same level as in the mid-1990s.

The former No.1 cellphone maker had hoped the New York launch would convince markets that its alliance with Microsoft Corp. would signal a reversal of its slide against market leaders Apple Inc.'s iPhone and Samsung, and devices using Google's Android platform.

In early afternoon trading, Nokia had recovered slightly, trading 1 percent lower at €1.97 ($2.48).

Nokia Cuts Prices Of Older Windows Phones, Shares Fall

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Loss-making Nokia has slashed prices of its older smartphone models using Microsoft Windows software, industry sources said on Thursday, a day after investors gave its latest Lumia phones a rapid thumbs-down.

Two industry sources told Reuters that the Finnish group, which is struggling to recoup ground lost to its rivals, cut the price of its mid-range Lumia 800 Windows Phone by around 15 percent this week and made smaller reductions on other Windows models.
Nokia shares continued falling on Thursday after slumping 13 percent on Wednesday as the firm unveiled two new Windows Phone models in what may be the last major shot at reclaiming market share lost to Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Google Inc.
Nokia did not disclose the price or roll-out dates of the new models - which with their rounded edges and colourful covers look similar to their predecessors - and its share fell a further 4.6 percent to 1.9 euros by 1320 GMT on Thursday.
Research firm CCS Insight, which tracks market prices, confirmed the cuts and said they were necessary to keep momentum behind current Lumia 800 and 900 devices now when new products have been announced using the updated Windows Phone 8 software.
The company did not officially disclose the price cuts of the older phones but said such steps were a normal part of its business.
The lower prices will hurt Nokia's bottom line, particularly in September and October as analysts expect the new models to begin contributing to results only the following month.
Analysts saidthe new models would probably reach the market by November at the earliest, with the high-end 920 model - which featured a high-quality camera and touch screen that can be used with gloves - likely to sell for a price similar to Apple's next iPhone. This will be unveiled next week and probably go on sale this month.
The new Nokia phones will also face stiff competition from Samsung, which last week unveiled the world's first Windows Phone 8 model, and new models from HTC and Google's Motorola.
Nokia needs the new models to succeed as it has logged more than 3 billion euros ($3.78 billion) in operating losses in the last 18 months, forcing it to cut 10,000 jobs and pursue asset sales.
Analysts expect it to lose another 700 million euros in the July-September quarter as it sells 3.6 million Windows Phones, down from the last quarter.
In comparison, Samsung said on Thursday it has sold more than 20 million units of its flagship smartphone Galaxy S3 alone in 100 days.
Samsung has become the world's largest smartphone maker as Nokia's share of the market has plunged to less than 10 percent from 50 percent during its heyday before the iPhone was launched in 2007.
Following Nokia's product launch, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale and S&P Equity Research, all cut their recommendation on the stock to "sell".
"We believe Nokia will struggle to regain sufficient market share with Windows 8 devices to offset increasing pressure on its Mobile Phone business from lowcost Android devices in 2013," Deutsche Bank analyst Kai Korschelt said in a research note.
Retail prices of smartphones using Google's market-leading Android software have dropped below $100, a level other smartphones are struggling to reach due to their high requirements on features like processing power. ($1 = 0.7935 euros)

Gravity Waves Give Twin Stars Speed Boost, Scientists Say

 Two stars circling each other are speeding up in a tell-tale way that scientists attribute to gravitational waves: ripples in the very fabric of space and time.

The stars are dense objects called white dwarfs, which are so close together they take less than 13 minutes to orbit each other. The two white dwarfs, remnants of stars that used to be as big as our sun, are only spread apart by one-third of the distance between the Earth and the moon.

In observing this system, astronomers have made the first measurements in optical light of motions that must be caused by gravitational waves, they said.

"This result marks one of the cleanest and strongest detections of the effect of gravitational waves," astronomer Warren Brown of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory said in a statement. [8 Baffling Astronomy Mysteries]

Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, which posits that gravity warps space and time, causing objects traveling through it to follow a curved path. White dwarfs, being so dense, are thought to create such waves of gravity if they orbit around each other so closely. These waves would carry energy away from the system, causing the stars to crowd closer together and speed up in their orbital motion.

When astronomers first observed this system, designated SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (J0651 for short), the stars appeared to eclipse each other, or overlap, slightly less often.

"Compared to April 2011, when we discovered this object, the eclipses now happen six seconds sooner than expected," said research team member Mukremin Kilic of the University of Oklahoma.

This quickening of motion is just what's expected if gravitational waves are being produced.

Such waves have never been detected directly, though a previous observation of a binary system composed of two dense stellar remnants (a pulsar and a neutron star) in radio light observed a similar quickening of their orbital motion. That observation, by Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor, was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for providing the first indication of gravitational waves.

A ground-based experiment called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) could be the first to detect these space-time ripples directly when an upgraded version is complete in the next few years.

As for the two white dwarfs in J0651, scientists predict they will continue to orbit each other faster and faster in the future, with eclipses occurring more than 20 seconds sooner in April 2013 than they did in April 2011. Each year, about 0.25 milliseconds is shaved from the total orbital period of the stars.

After about 2 million years, the white dwarfs will come so close together they merge into one.

"Every six minutes the stars in J0651 eclipse each other as seen from Earth, which makes for an unparalleled and accurate clock some 3,000 light-years away," said study lead author J.J. Hermes, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

The new measurements were made using more than 200 hours of observations from telescopes in Texas, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Spain's Canary Islands.

7 Year Old Colo Girl Recovers From Bubonic Plague

DENVER (AP) — The parents of 7-year-old Sierra Jane Downing thought she had the flu when she felt sick days after camping in southwest Colorado.

It wasn't until she had a seizure that her father knew something was seriously wrong and rushed her to a hospital in their town of Pagosa Springs. She had a 107-degree fever, and doctors were baffled by the cause.

"I didn't know what was going on. I just reacted," Sean Downing said. "I thought she died."

The Downings eventually learned their daughter was ill with one of the last things they would've thought: bubonic plague, a disease that wiped out one-third of Europe in the 14th century but is now exceedingly rare — it hasn't been confirmed in Colorado since 2006 — and treatable if caught early.

Federal health officials say they are aware of two other confirmed and one probable case of plague in the U.S. so far this year — an average year. The other confirmed cases were in New Mexico and Oregon, and the probable case also was in Oregon. None were fatal.

Plague is generally transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas but also can be transmitted by direct contact with infected animals, including rodents, rabbits and pets.

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that a series of frightening illnesses linked to insects and pests have been surfacing lately across the country, including mosquito-borne West Nile virus outbreaks in Texas and other states, deadly hantavirus cases linked to Yosemite National Park, and some scattered plague cases.

But with some of the illnesses — like plague — this is not an unusually bad year; it's just getting attention. And the number of cases of each disease is driven by different factors.

"I don't think there's a confluence of any particular set of factors" driving the recent illness reports, said Kiersten Kugeler, a CDC epidemiologist in Colorado who tracks plague reports.

In Sierra Jane's case, a Pagosa Springs emergency room doctor who saw her late on Aug. 24 called other hospitals, some of whom thought she'd be fine the next day, before the girl was flown to Denver, Sean Downing said.

There, a pediatric doctor at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children racing to save Sierra Jane's life got the first inkling that she had bubonic plague. Dr. Jennifer Snow suspected the disease based on the girl's symptoms, a history of where she'd been, and an online journal's article on a teen with similar symptoms.

Dr. Wendi Drummond, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the hospital, agreed and ordered a specific antibiotic for Sierra Jane while tests were run, later confirming their rare diagnosis.

It was the first bubonic plague case Snow and her colleagues had seen.

"I credit them for thinking outside the box," said Dr. Tracy Butler, medical director of the hospital's pediatric intensive unit.

It's not clear why Colorado hasn't seen another human case until now, state public health veterinarian Elisabeth Lawaczeck said.

By the night of Aug. 25, Sierra Jane's heart rate was high, her blood pressure was low, and a swollen lymph node in her left groin was so painful it hurt to undergo the ultrasound that detected the enlarged node, Snow said.

Doctors say the girl could be discharged from the hospital within a week.

On Wednesday, Sierra Jane flashed a smile with two dimples as she faced reporters in a wheelchair, her pink-toed socks peeking out from the white blanket enveloping her as she held a brown teddy bear.

"She's just a fighter," said her mother, Darcy Downing.

Darcy Downing said her daughter may have been infected by insects near a dead squirrel she wanted to bury at their campground on U.S. Forest Service land, even though Darcy had warned her daughter to leave it alone. She remembered catching her daughter near the squirrel with her sweat shirt on the ground. Her daughter later had the shirt tied around her torso, where doctors spotted insect bites.

The bubonic plague, or Black Death, killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe in the Middle Ages. Today, it can be treated with antibiotics, but it's important to catch it early.

"If she had stayed home, she could've easily died within 24 to 48 hours from the shock of infection," Snow said.

Jupiter-Bound Probe's Maneuver In Deep Space Delayed

The second of two engine burns meant to put NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno probe on course for a speed-boosting Earth flyby next year has been pushed to Sept. 14, officials announced Tuesday (Sept. 4).

The burn was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but the mission team delayed it by 10 days after analyzing the results of the Juno spacecraft's previous engine firing, which took place Aug. 30.

The Aug. 30 engine burn worked well, changing Juno's velocity by 770 mph (1,240 kph) as planned. However, the 30-minute maneuver also caused propellant pressure in the spacecraft's propulsion system to rise higher than expected, researchers said.

"The team has decided to take an extra 10 days to analyze this increase and consider mitigation options, placing the second deep space maneuver on Sept. 14," NASA officials wrote in a mission update on Tuesday. "There will be no impact to the mission's timeline or science."

The two deep space engine burns are designed to set Juno up for a close flyby of Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, which will bring the probe to within 310 miles (500 kilometers) of our planet. If all goes as planned, Earth's gravity will slingshot Juno toward Jupiter, boosting the probe's speed by 16,330 mph (26,280 kph), researchers said.

The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched on Aug. 5, 2011 and is scheduled to arrive at the solar system's largest planet on July 4, 2016. Juno will orbit Jupiter for about a year, using eight science instruments to peer beneath the thick Jovian clouds.

Juno's main goal is to learn about Jupiter's atmosphere, magnetosphere, composition and origins, and to determine if the planet has a solid core. Learning about the formation of Jupiter — which snapped up most of the material left over after the sun's formation — can teach us a lot about the history of Earth and the solar system in general, scientists have said.

The Juno probe weighs about 8,000 pounds (3,267 kilograms) and draws its energy from the sun. The mission marks the first time a solar-powered probe has ventured as far out into the solar system as Jupiter.

Transgender-Inmate Ruling Is Movement's Latest Win

Years ago, in a darkened parking lot in the middle of the night, Kathy Padilla would meet with fellow transgender people who sought support from one another in a society that treated them like outcasts.

How things have changed since then for transgender men and women in America, who have made great strides in recent years toward reaching their ultimate goal: to be treated like ordinary people. On Tuesday, they won another victory when a Massachusetts judge became the first to order prison officials to provide sex-reassignment surgery for a murder convict, saying it was the only way to treat her gender-identity disorder.

The ruling marked the latest milestone in the increasing visibility of a class of people once roundly derided as freaks or used as a punch line.

"Now there are transgender delegates at the Democratic National Convention," said Padilla, a 55-year-old transgender woman from Philadelphia who has been an advocate since 1984. "And a number of transgender people have been invited to the White House."

In recent years, more than a dozen states have revised anti-discrimination laws to include transgender people, giving them hate-crime protection and providing rights as basic as restroom access. Transgender officials have helped raise the movement's profile by winning elective office in city halls, landing coveted appointments in the White House and, yes, sending delegates to political conventions.

The Massachusetts court ruling, though, shines a light on what many advocates view as the worst form of discrimination still faced by transgender people: lack of access to medical care.

"Transgender people are still denied health care access all the time," said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. "There's insufficient training, insufficient cultural competency, and insufficient humanity sometimes."

Transitioning from one sex to another can involve a variety of treatments, including hormone therapy, but the most expensive one is a sex-change operation, which can cost up to $20,000. Even though the American Medical Association and other medical experts recommend coverage of services for transgender people, a small but growing number of companies that actually provide it — including Apple Inc., Accenture PLC and American Express Co. — are still the exception.

Federal health care that covers treatment for gender-identity disorders is virtually nonexistent, with no services for federal employees, veterans or Medicare recipients.

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who as a state senator filed unsuccessful legislation in the late 2000s to ban the use of tax money to pay for the surgery for prison inmates, said surgery for the inmate at the center of Tuesday's ruling would be "an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars."

"We have many big challenges facing us as a nation, but nowhere among those issues would I include providing sex change surgery to convicted murderers," he said in a written statement. "I look forward to common sense prevailing and the ruling being overturned."

In July, Leon Rodriguez, director of the federal Department of Health and Human Services' office for civil rights, sent a letter to an advocate reaffirming that federal health care funding extends to medical needs of transgender people. But the agency also said insurers are not required to cover "transition related surgery."

The nation as a whole has not yet embraced the idea that a gender reassignment surgery is a medically necessary procedure that could have dramatic health benefits, advocates say.

"If somebody doesn't receive treatment, it can lead to very serious incidents of self-harm," said Jennifer Levi, a professor of law at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass. "One of the things that the judge recognized is that there's a lot of public misunderstanding about the experience of transsexualism. And there's a lot of bias and prejudice."

In the Massachusetts case, the judge noted that inmate Michelle Kosilek's gender-identity disorder has caused her such anguish that she has tried to castrate herself and twice tried to commit suicide. Kosilek was named Robert when married to Cheryl Kosilek and convicted of murdering her in 1990.

While courts around the country have found that prisons must evaluate transgender inmates to determine their health care needs, most have ordered hormone treatments and psychotherapy. Wolf is the first judge to order sex-reassignment surgery as a remedy to gender-identity disorder.

"There are still people who believe that being a transgender person is a choice, or exotic or bad," Keisling said. "And you know, those people are becoming fewer and fewer all the time."

Turning the tide of public opinion has also been aided by famous transgender people like Keelin Godsey, a shotputter who this summer fell just short of becoming the first transgender athlete to make the U.S. Olympic team. And there's Stu Rasmussen, of Silverton, Ore., who became the country's first openly transgender mayor in 2008 when he defeated the incumbent following a campaign that focused on policy — not the fact that Rasmussen was wearing dresses and 3-inch heels.

Soon after Rasmussen's victory, President Barack Obama appointed three transgender people to posts in the Commerce Department, Labor Department and Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS . Obama later signed a landmark bill to expand the definition of hate crime violence, making it the first federal law to include legal protections for transgender people.

This year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that sex discrimination laws cover transgender people, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development ruled that transgender and gay people are protected from discrimination in federally funded housing, which includes Section 8 housing and homeless shelters.

"More and more people in the public are recognizing that transgender people are people," Keisling said. "And that being a transsexual or having gender identity is an actual, real, core component of a person's identity."

NFL Pledges $30 Million For Medical Research

NEW YORK (AP) — The NFL has pledged $30 million for medical research to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.
Commissioner Roger Goodell on Wednesday announced the donation to the foundation, which helps raise private funding for the NIH, the nation's leading medical research agency.
The same day the grant was announced, researchers published a study indicating that former NFL players are unusually prone to dying from degenerative brain disease.

The work, presented online in the journal Neurology, drew on a long-running study of more than 3,400 NFL players with at least five playing seasons in the league between 1959 and 1988. Some 334 had died by the end of 2007, the cutoff for the study.

Researchers found that deaths from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's diseases, when combined, reached about three times the rate one would predict from the general population. The study did not look for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but researchers said some of the deaths they counted could have been from misdiagnosed CTE.

The research funded by the NFL's grant is designed to benefit athletes and the general population, including members of the military, Goodell said.

Potential areas of research under the grant include the brain, specifically CTE, concussion management and treatment, and the understanding of the relationship between traumatic brain injury and late-life neurodegenerative disorders, especially Alzheimer's disease.

"We hope this grant will help accelerate the medical community's pursuit of pioneering research to enhance the health of athletes past, present and future," Goodell said.

The players union released a statement commending the donation.

"The players applaud the NFL's decision to independently fund a research partnership between the NFL and National Institutes of Health," the NFLPA said in a statement. "We look forward to reviewing their findings."

Former Vikings defensive end Carl Eller, who is the chairman of the board for the NFL Retired Players Association, said the donation would probably help future and current players more than past ones.

"My position would be that it could have been better spent with retired players," Eller said. "I think we have players that could benefit from that more specifically."

Dr. Stephanie James, acting executive director of the Foundation for the NIH, expects the grant to have a positive effect on people in all walks of life.

"We are grateful for the NFL's generosity," James said. "The research to be funded by this donation will accelerate scientific discovery that will benefit athletes and the general public alike."

The distribution of funds from the grant will be governed by federal law and policy applicable to NIH-funded research. The NFL will have no early or special access to scientific study data.

AIDS Science Leaping Ahead, But Will The Money Follow?

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Last year, the HIV/AIDS community got some startling news.
Lifesaving drugs known as antiretrovirals that have brought millions of AIDS sufferers back from the brink also dramatically cut the risk that they will transmit the virus to their loved ones - by as much as 96 percent.

The landmark study, known as the HIV Prevention Trials Network 052 trial, proved that AIDS treatment was also a powerful form of prevention. Science magazine dubbed it the 2011 Breakthrough of the Year.

The findings - along with studies on the preventive benefits of circumcision and treating high-risk individuals before they are exposed to HIV - have been heralded as weapons that could finally break the back of the AIDS epidemic.

"What was unthinkable just three years ago is now in sight: an AIDS-free generation and the end of this epidemic," Ambassador Mark Dybul, former U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator for President George W. Bush, said at the 2012 International AIDS Conference in July.

But fully rolling out treatment as prevention would mean more than doubling current HIV treatment goals, from the current United Nations target of treating 15 million by 2015 to 34 million, a staggering increase.

With some recession-strapped donor countries already struggling to meet their current commitments for treatment and prevention programs, AIDS activists worry that money, and not science, could hold up progress in the war on AIDS.

EARLIER TREATMENT GAINS TRACTION

"The benefits of early detection and treatment have never been more clear, but countries have never been more challenged to provide needed resources," Kaiser Family Foundation Chief Drew Altman said in a statement.

Total funding for HIV prevention, care and treatment has been flat for the past three years, as countries balance the needs of their own struggling economies with their commitment to fighting AIDS.

Funding for low- and middle-income countries totaled $16.8 billion last year, the latest United Nations figures show. Rich donor nations provided $8.2 billion of that sum, nearly half from the United States.

An analysis by Kaiser and the United Nations found that United States and Britain - the two biggest donor nations - increased funding in 2011 over 2010. Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden flatlined funding, and Ireland, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands made cuts.

"The funding environment is very tough," billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates said at the AIDS conference last month.

"Some days it feels like we're going to have to fight just to keep the funding at the level it's at today, and yet we need to put new patients on treatment."

One bright spot is that poor and middle-income countries increasingly are stepping up, according to the United Nations.

In 2011, low- and middle-income countries spent $8.6 billion last year on HIV/AIDS - the first time such nations have outspent rich donors. Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, as well as China and India, increased domestic spending on AIDS.

Altogether, that $16.8 billion helped cover HIV treatments for 8 million people in middle- and lower-income countries, up from 6.6 million in 2010. But that is still $7.2 billion a year short of what the United Nations says it needs to reach its goal of treating and caring for 15 million infected individuals by 2015.

That goal reflects World Health Organization recommendations that those diagnosed with HIV should start treatment when their infection-fighting cells fall below a certain level, a sign that their immune system is weakening.

But the 052 prevention study, which involved 1,763 couples across Africa, Asia and the Americas, argues for earlier treatment, before their immune system begins to fail.

"The study demonstrates tremendous benefit in early and probably immediate treatment of people who are tested positive for HIV, before their health is compromised, to render them non-infectious as well," said Dr. Myron Cohen, an HIV/AIDS researcher at the University of North Carolina and leader of the trial.

The findings, published in August 2011 in the New England Journal of Medicine, made clear the need for a major expansion of treatment.

Nearly a year later, the World Health Organization recommended 'strategic use' of antiretrovirals, saying they should be offered to HIV-infected individuals with uninfected partners, to pregnant women and to high-risk populations, regardless of their immune status.

Those changes would increase the number of people eligible for treatment from 15 million to 23 million, WHO said.

That is still short of recommendations for treating all HIV-infected individuals, a position backed earlier this year by both the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the nonprofit International Antiviral Society-USA. WHO said it is considering universal treatment based on the findings, something Cohen thinks is ultimately inevitable.

"You will have several years to ratchet up, but if there are 34 million people who are infected, there are 34 million people who need to be treated," Cohen said.

"We might as well just accept that."

'SELLING' PREVENTION

For donor nations and resource-poor governments to embrace that new reality, however, it may take a lot more proof.

One hesitation is that the drugs work so well that people who take them can live basically a normal life, which means countries are on the hook for a lifetime of treatment.

"It frightens people," Cohen said. "They squirm and say, 'Oh my god; 34 million people for 50 years on these drugs. It's impossible.'"

In 2000, the annual cost of antiretroviral treatment was $10,000, leading donor nations to talk about "treatment mortgages." Now, greater access to generics has cut the cost of treatment to less than $100 a year for the least-expensive WHO-recommended regimen.

But HIV patients often develop resistance to first-line therapies, forcing patients to move to more costly treatments to keep the virus under control.

Dr. Brian Williams, a Geneva-based epidemiologist at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis, said many modeling studies suggest that universal treatment would be cost effective. He estimates overall costs for antiretroviral treatment at $500 per patient per year, putting the annual cost of treating 30 million HIV-infected individuals at roughly $15 billion.

Those figures do not include other HIV prevention efforts, nor do they include the cost of testing and caring for HIV-infected individuals.

Even so, Williams says it is feasible.

The challenge is trying to sell the prevention aspect of treatment as cost-effective.

As Williams put it: "The science is the easy bit. The politics is the hard bit."

Dr. José Zuniga, president of the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care, said scientific advances have raised hope for an end to AIDS, but researchers need to temper that with the reality that it will be tough to translate the science into the potential benefit "without some heavy lifting." That includes making strong, fact-based arguments that help people think beyond the near-term.

In addition to treatment as prevention, Zuniga sees promise in studies showing that giving antiretrovirals to healthy people at high risk of HIV-infection can slow transmission, although many questions remain about this approach, called Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis or PrEP.

HIV/AIDS experts will test these efforts - along with less costly approaches, such as counseling, condom use and circumcision - in as many as 50 studies globally to see how well they work in real-world settings.

Dr. Sten Vermund of the HIV Medicine Association and an HIV/AIDS researcher at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, calls this "operational research."

He is part of a U.S.-backed trial that will study a combination of testing, counseling and early antiretroviral therapy among different populations in Zambia and South Africa.

Another study by Johns Hopkins will look at prevention strategies in Tanzania, and a third from Harvard will study prevention strategies in Botswana.

"While we believe the more people we treat, the more benefit we'll see, we are trying to prove that to ourselves so we can weigh the benefit at the public health level," Cohen said.

Cohen says he appreciates the strain that vastly expanding HIV treatment will place on health systems, but he thinks countries "should not look at it as a commitment forever."

Instead, he sees it as a bridge to the next big breakthrough, and he calls on funding agencies to redouble their research efforts in finding a vaccine or even a cure, which would hasten the end of the epidemic.

Cohen draws on the past for proof, noting that in 1985, 14 percent of all patients admitted to his hospital in North Carolina were infected with HIV.

"They all died."

Ten years later, Cohen was caring for a young woman whom he thought would die. She started taking AZT, the very first HIV drug. When she returned to the hospital later for a minor hand infection, she had gained 20 pounds.

"It was the most amazing thing I'd seen in my career."

Having witnessed that, Cohen said, "I wouldn't be very surprised to see something else tremendously different in 2025."

Blaze At India Fireworks Factory Kills At Least 40

NEW DELHI (AP) — A massive blaze raged for hours at a fireworks factory in southern India, killing at least 40 workers and injuring 60 Wednesday, police said.

Large amounts of firecrackers and raw materials had been stored in the Om Siva Shakti factory with major Hindu festivals weeks away.

Police officer Najmul Huda said rescue workers and firefighters initially could not get into the building as the fire raged, triggering deafening explosions of firecrackers.

Workers fled the area, but many were killed as they waited at a nearby warehouse which also caught fire and exploded, Huda told reporters.

The Press Trust of India news agency said that about 300 people were working in the factory and 52 died.

Huda said authorities had suspended the factory's license a day earlier after finding major safety violations. The management, however, operated the factory illegally on Wednesday, he said.

The fire, which spread to 40 of the factory's 60 rooms, was put out more than five hours after it began, witnesses and news reports said. Photographs showed the factory had burned to rubble, and fireworks littered the ground.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known, police officer P. Karupaiah said.

Sivakasi town in Tamil Nadu state is India's biggest hub for the manufacture of matches and firecrackers. The town is about 500 kilometers (310 miles) southwest of Chennai, the state capital.

The CNN-IBN television news channel said rescue workers had completed a search of the devastated building for trapped workers.

Nationalism Stokes Island Disputes Around Asia

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — They are mere specks on the map. Many are uninhabited, and others sparsely so by fishermen and seasonal residents. Yet the disputed ownership of these tiny constellations of islands is inflaming nationalist fervor from the cold North Pacific to the tropical South China Sea.

In recent weeks, these long-simmering tensions have returned to a boil, with violent protests in Chinese cities, a provocative island junket by South Korea's lame-duck president, and Japan's government reportedly planning to buy disputed islands from their private owners.

The popular analysis is that the rising tensions are fueled by a regional power shift that has seen China become increasingly assertive with its neighbors in securing claims over potentially resource-rich waters to its south and east. But the growing acrimony may have at least as much to do with domestic political posturing.

"Wrapping yourself up in the national flag gives a very convenient exit for people with other agendas to justify their positions," says political scientist Koichi Nakano of Tokyo's Sophia University.

Nationalism has often been used by China's communist leaders to cover up domestic problems — such as the economic slowdown the country is now facing, not to mention problems with a growing rich-poor divide and official corruption.

The same could be said, to an extent, in Japan and South Korea, where some politicians seem to be using the island disputes to further their agenda ahead of elections or to divert attention from thornier topics.

Few believe the diverse Asian actors in this rapidly developing drama will actually come to blows, but manipulation of popular opinion in island disputants like China, South Korea and the Philippines is raising the chances of violence by either accident or miscalculation. Such an outcome would seriously threaten the fragile tranquility that has helped catapult tens of millions of Asians from poverty to prosperity.

The disputed islands were on the agenda this week as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled across the region.

Meeting Monday with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, she urged members of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations to present a united front to China in dealing with territorial disputes in the South China Sea. She also discussed the issue with Chinese leaders during meetings in Beijing this week.

Preferred access to potentially lucrative oil and gas reserves and rich fishing grounds is helping to drive the disputes, along with an increasingly prosperous and militarily strong China that is beginning to challenge America's historic supremacy as a Pacific power.

"There is a big power shift in this region and that is encouraging the parties involved to make their case in order not to lose their ground," said security specialist Narushige Michishita of Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

But the nationalist card is also front and center as governments jockey for position.

"Nationalism is playing a very large role in all of these disputes," said international relations specialist George Tsai of Taipei's Chinese Culture University. "Whether it's China, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines or Korea, all these countries are appealing to nationalist sentiments."

Right-wing politicians in Japan are using the issue to drum up nationalist support, and even mainstream politicians within the ruling party seem willing to let the issue grab headlines from issues like a tax hike and energy policy reforms that are being demanded after last year's nuclear disaster, Nakano says.

Similar motives can be seen in outgoing South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's visit to an island claimed by Seoul and Tokyo as he seeks to boost his legacy on what could become a key issue in his party's bid to maintain power in what will be a toughly fought election.

Last month lame duck Lee became the first Korean president to set foot on Dokdo island, which is called Takeshima by Japan. Korea and Japan have a bitter history — marked by decades of harsh Japanese colonial rule on the Korean peninsula. Thumbing one's nose at Tokyo has long had substantial cache for millions of Koreans.

"I'm skeptical that this has anything to do with international relations," Nakano said. "It has more to do with domestic politics because internationally it doesn't make any sense."

In the Philippines, President Benigno Aquino III has been much more outspoken than predecessor Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on the need to defend the country's territorial claims, and has publicly appealed to the U.S. for help with China's challenge to disputed areas in the South China Sea.

Aquino wants international arbitrators to resolve the issues, a stance that has nettled China, which insists the best way of settling differences with Asian neighbors is through bilateral talks.

China has also been at loggerheads with Vietnam, particularly after Beijing's formal creation of a municipality headquartered on Woody Island in the Paracel Islands, long a bone of contention between the two nations. China and Vietnam have a millennia-long history of fear and loathing, and China's establishment of a Paracels prefecture prompted anti-China demonstrations in Hanoi, where authorities are normally quick to squelch popular manifestations of anger.

Vietnam has also sparred with Taiwan over the South China Sea's Spratly Islands, claimed by China, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia. On Tuesday, the Taiwanese Coast Guard held a live fire exercise on Taiping Island in the Spratly chain, partly in response to the Vietnamese occupation of other Spratly locations. Taiwanese legislators rushed to attend the exercises.

Just north of Taiwan, China and Japan remain immersed in their long-running battle over what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands and the Chinese call Diaoyutai. Located roughly equidistant from Chinese and Japanese territory, the Japanese-controlled islands surged to prominence earlier this year when Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo's strongly nationalistic governor, proposed purchasing and developing them. Japan's central government stepped in, and on Wednesday Japanese media reported it had agreed to buy several islands from their private Japanese owners — a move that Japanese experts say is an attempt to sideline Ishihara and his nationalistic agenda.

Thousands took to the streets in Chinese cities last month to protest Japan's claims, with demonstrators burning flags and vandalizing Japanese restaurants and cars.

US Expects South China Sea Tensions To Rise

Clinton in East Timor On Democracy Push

DILI, East Timor (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton praised East Timor on Thursday for holding fair elections this year, and said it was up to the government of Asia's newest and poorest nation to decide when and how to seek accountability for past violence during its struggle for independence.

Clinton said her visit, the first by a U.S. secretary of state to East Timor, was "a visible sign of our support for all that has been accomplished by the people of this nation." She and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao enjoyed coffee produced by a cooperative that helps supply the Starbucks Corp. chain.

At a press conference with Gusmao, Clinton congratulated East Timor on "three sets of free and fair elections this year, and a peaceful transfer of power to a new president, government and parliament."

There was some violence, including one death, following July's parliamentary polls. The top vote-getter, Gusmao's National Congress for the Reconstruction of East Timor, formed a coalition that excluded the runner-up Fretilin party, angering Fretilin supporters.

Clinton met Timorese officials as they prepared for the departure of the last of nearly 1,300 U.N. peacekeepers from the small, half-island nation by year's end.

A Portuguese colony for three centuries, East Timor voted in 1999 to end 24 years of Indonesian occupation that left more than 170,000 dead. Withdrawing Indonesian troops and proxy militias killed almost 1,500 people and destroyed much of the country's infrastructure.

Clinton said it is important for the people of East Timor to have accountability for abuses committed during the independence struggle, but added that the U.S. would "take the lead from the Timorese government" on how to achieve that.

"It is difficult to talk about this," Gusmao said, "when we need to have good relations with our closest neighbor." About 70 percent of East Timor's trade is with Indonesia.

"Democracy can only survive if we have development," he said.

Clinton announced new programs including $6.5 million to bring Timorese students to the United States to study. She is in the middle of an Asia trip with stops in the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, Brunei and Russia's Far East.