Plaintiffs in Calif. marriage case marry in SF

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? The lead plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned California's same-sex marriage ban tied the knot at San Francisco City Hall on Friday, about an hour after an appeals court cleared the way for same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses for the first time in 4 1/2 years.

State Attorney General Kamala Harris presided at the wedding of Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, of Berkeley. The couple sued to overturn the state's voter-approved gay marriage ban along with Jeff Katami and Paul Zarrillo, of Burbank, who planned to marry Friday evening at Los Angeles City Hall.

"They have waited and fought for this moment," Harris said. "Today their wait is finally over."

Harris declared Perry, 48, and Stier, 50, "spouses for life," but during their vows, they took each other as "lawfully wedded wife."

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a brief order Friday afternoon dissolving a stay it imposed on gay marriages while the lawsuit challenging Proposition 8 worked its way through the courts.

Sponsors of California's same-sex marriage ban said the appeals court's decision was "disgraceful."

Anthony Pugno, general counsel for a coalition of religious conservative groups, called the 9th Circuit's order an "outrageous act" by judges and politicians determined to overturn Proposition 8.

He called the court's decision an "abuse of power to manipulate the system and render the people voiceless."

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that the sponsors of California's voter-approved gay marriage ban lacked authority to defend the measure in court once Harris and Gov. Jerry Brown refused to do so.

The decision lets stand a trial judge's declaration that the ban, approved by voters in November 2008, violates the civil rights of gay Californians and cannot be enforced.

Under Supreme Court rules, the losing side in a legal dispute has 25 days to ask the high court to rehear the case. The court said earlier this week that it would not finalize its ruling in the Proposition 8 dispute until after that time had elapsed.

It was not immediately clear whether the appeals court's action would be halted by the high court.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/plaintiffs-calif-marriage-case-marry-sf-000449812.html

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Take Steps to Protect Your Home and Family During Severe ...

(BPT) ? The warm summer brings about plenty of fun in the sun with picnics, camping and backyard parties. However, these months can produce severe weather, from tornadoes to hurricanes. In addition to planning fun outdoor activities to enjoy in the summer heat, Americans should also prepare their homes for the worst that Mother Nature can bring.

Recent weather events like Superstorm Sandy along the East Coast and the tornadoes in Oklahoma have heightened awareness about emergency preparedness and the importance of having reliable backup power. Severe summer storms can strike at any moment anywhere in the U.S., so it?s important for all homeowners to develop an emergency plan now, before the next big storm hits. Here are a few tips to help people protect their homes, belongings and families during severe weather events.

* Consider emergency backup power ? During Superstorm Sandy, more than 8 million homes lost power up and down the East Coast and in states as far west as Michigan. Power lines are easily damaged by high winds, heavy rains and even lightning. A permanent standby generator is often viewed as the best option for homeowners to maintain power during and after severe weather, because it provides automatic, whole-home power during extended outages.

?When the power goes out, it completely changes the way you live,? says Ed Del Grande, a master contractor, syndicated home improvement columnist and host on the DIY network. ?A standby generator can power an entire home during an outage, which means your life continues uninterrupted. This is particularly important for homes with small children, the elderly or home-based businesses.?

A standby generator is recommended by most professionals because it turns on automatically when power is lost from the utility and is permanently connected to the home like a central air conditioning unit. Because of this, homeowners do not need to be home to turn the generator on or have to go out into severe weather to set it up. The unit also connects to existing fuel lines in the home, running on propane or natural gas, and can power the entire home, including essential items like air conditioning, lights, refrigerators and freezers, security systems, electronic devices and more.

To learn more about standby power, visit KohlerGenerators.com to view educational videos and access a sizing calculator to determine what kind of a standby generator is needed for your home.

* Establish an emergency plan ? Involve the entire family in your emergency plan, which should include details about the safest room in the home during severe weather, evacuation routes from the home and a predetermined meeting place in case your family gets separated during an evacuation.

As part of this plan, create a storm kit for your home and keep it replenished all summer long. To start a kit, get a plastic bucket or backpack and fill it with emergency supplies ? water, first aid kit, flashlights and extra batteries, a radio, nonperishable food and cash. In addition, scan all of your important paperwork, like financial documents, insurance papers and birth certificates, and save them to a USB drive or CD. Once your storm kit is assembled, store it in a secure location in the home where all family members can access it. For more information and suggestions for building a storm kit, visit www.GreatHurricaneBlowout.org.

* Stay informed ? During the summer, stay tuned to local weather forecasters when threatening weather is on the horizon and follow directions provided by local emergency officials to help keep your family and your home as secure as possible. Invest in a weather radio that alerts you and your family of potentially dangerous weather in your area. This is especially important when severe weather strikes in the middle of the night.

Source: http://tolucantimes.info/section/inside-this-issue/take-steps-to-protect-your-home-and-family-during-severe-summer-weather/

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Car buyers appear unfazed by stock market gyrations

Autos

Joseph Szczesny The Detroit Bureau

June 28, 2013 at 10:10 AM ET

Keith Srakocic / AP

In this Wednesday, May 8, 2013 photo, a row of new 2013 Ford Fusions is seen at an automobile dealership in Zelienople, Pa.

It seems like the recent stock market tumble, and the perception that interest rates are rising, are, at most, background noise to American car buyers.

Sales of new cars and trucks continue to move along at a steady clip during June, according to new estimates from J.D. Power & Associates and LMC Automotive. A monthly sales forecast based on direct dealer data indicates new-vehicle retail sales are showing no signs of letting up at the start of the summer selling season.

New-vehicle retail sales in June are projected to come in at 1,118,800 vehicles, which represent a Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate of 13.2 million units, a healthy increase of 500,000 from the May SAAR. Retail transactions are the most accurate measure of true underlying consumer demand for new vehicles.

Total light-vehicle sales in June 2013 are expected to grow by 12 percent from June 2012 to 1,380,800 units. Fleet sales in June are just 19 percent of total sales. Fleet volume for the month is projected at 262,000 units.

Adding together retail and fleet business and the overall SAAR is expected to reach 15.7 million units this month. That?s a big jump from the 14.5 million vehicles sold in 2012 ? a five-year high ? and nudges by even the most optimistic forecasts for 2013, which general had set a high of around 15.5 million sales this year.

The strong selling pace continues to be matched by strong transaction prices. Thus far in June, the average transaction price of new vehicles ? what customers actually spend when both incentives and options are included ?is $28,900, the highest figure ever for June.

While sales overall are strong, not all segments are selling at the same pace. Sales of premium vehicles account for just 11.7 percent of new-vehicle retail sales thus far in June, down from 12.9 percent in June 2012.

?Although the premium segment growth has lagged non-premium, there is some good news for the industry in that the average price of premium vehicles in June is $47,000, up almost 4 percent from June 2012,? said John Humphrey, J.D. Power senior vice president of the global automotive practice. ?New premium vehicles entering the market late this year will also help bolster sales through the second quarter of 2014.?

Among other new models due for launch are the all-new Mercedes-Benz S-Class and a trio of luxury diesels from Audi.

The underperformance of premium light-vehicle sales is largely due to the age of the models in these segments. J.D. Power calculates that the average age ? the number of months the vehicle has been in the market since it was introduced or redesigned ? of premium models sold in the second quarter of 2013 was 43 months. In comparison, the average age of non-premium models, excluding pickup trucks is only 34.5 months.

Hyundai America chief executive officer John Krafcik noted last week that competition in the auto industry is very fierce and forces manufacturers to intensify efforts to win over customers. Even the threat of higher interest rates hasn?t undermined the market?s momentum, he said.

Competition in the mid-sized segment has been particularly fierce in recent months with Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, Volkswagen and Kia all introducing new or substantially updated models. The compact and subcompact segment also have seen a flood of new entries.

J.D. Power expects that by the second quarter of 2014, the average age of premium products will fall to just 33 months, as new and redesigned products enter the marketplace.

LMC Automotive continues to hold the outlook for total light-vehicle sales in 2013 at 15.4 million units, but has increased its forecast for retail light-vehicle sales to 12.6 million units from 12.5 million units, as retail sales growth expands.

More from The Detroit Bureau:

'Lola' tops 200 mph, sets EV world speed record

Terrorists may be targeting our high-tech cars

Would you buy a Chinese-made Ford

Copyright ? 2009-2013, The Detroit Bureau

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663286/s/2dee0fac/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Cbusiness0Ccar0Ebuyers0Eappear0Eunfazed0Estock0Emarket0Egyrations0E6C10A464454/story01.htm

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Biochemists identify protease substrates important for bacterial growth and development

June 27, 2013 ? Reporting this month in Molecular Microbiology, Peter Chien and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst describe using a combination of biochemistry and mass spectrometry to "trap" scores of new candidate substrates of the protease ClpXP to reveal how protein degradation is critical to cell cycle progression and bacterial development. The new understanding could lead to identifying new antibiotic targets.

As Chien (pronounced Chen) explains, to carry out fundamental life processes such as growing and dividing, cells must orchestrate, in time and location, the production and degradation of hundreds of protein substrates. Even in simple bacteria, protein degradation is critical for making sure these organisms can grow and respond to their environment properly.

Scientists have known that a group of protein machines called energy-dependent proteases are responsible for the majority of this degradation, but what targets these machines recognize and how they do it has been unknown in many cases.

With the new series of experiments in the model bacteria Caulobacter crescentus in the Chien biochemistry and molecular biology laboratory, much more is now understood, he says. "We first generated a protease mutant that could recognize but not destroy its targets, acting as a 'trap' for protease substrates. After purifying this trap from living cells, we used mass spectrometry to identify proteins that were caught, finding over a hundred new candidate substrates. These targets covered all aspects of bacterial growth, including DNA replication, transcription and cytoskeletal changes."

Next, they focused on one of these new targets in detail, a protein called TacA. Caulobacter grow by making two different cell types every time they divide. TacA is responsible for making sure that one of these cell types forms properly.

"We used biochemistry and highly purified proteins to identify what parts of TacA were important for degradation by the ClpXP protease," Chien says. "We then made mutants of TacA that could not be degraded and found that when we expressed them in bacteria, these cells failed to properly develop into the correct cell types. Because developmental changes are essential for pathogenic bacteria to invade their host, these insights could potentially identify new antibiotic targets."

The work was funded by a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health and by UMass Amherst.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/health_medicine/genes/~3/Gyh3TNAT-yo/130627142551.htm

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Imagination can change what we hear and see

June 27, 2013 ? A study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows, that our imagination may affect how we experience the world more than we perhaps think. What we imagine hearing or seeing "in our head" can change our actual perception. The study, which is published in the scientific journal Current Biology, sheds new light on a classic question in psychology and neuroscience -- about how our brains combine information from the different senses.

"We often think about the things we imagine and the things we perceive as being clearly dissociable," says Christopher Berger, doctoral student at the Department of Neuroscience and lead author of the study. "However, what this study shows is that our imagination of a sound or a shape changes how we perceive the world around us in the same way actually hearing that sound or seeing that shape does. Specifically, we found that what we imagine hearing can change what we actually see, and what we imagine seeing can change what we actually hear."

The study consists of a series of experiments that make use of illusions in which sensory information from one sense changes or distorts one's perception of another sense. Ninety-six healthy volunteers participated in total.

In the first experiment, participants experienced the illusion that two passing objects collided rather than passed by one-another when they imagined a sound at the moment the two objects met. In a second experiment, the participants' spatial perception of a sound was biased towards a location where they imagined seeing the brief appearance of a white circle. In the third experiment, the participants' perception of what a person was saying was changed by their imagination of a particular sound.

According to the scientists, the results of the current study may be useful in understanding the mechanisms by which the brain fails to distinguish between thought and reality in certain psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. Another area of use could be research on brain computer interfaces, where paralyzed individuals' imagination is used to control virtual and artificial devices.

"This is the first set of experiments to definitively establish that the sensory signals generated by one's imagination are strong enough to change one's real-world perception of a different sensory modality" says Professor Henrik Ehrsson, the principle investigator behind the study.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Karolinska Institutet.

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

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Journal Reference:

1. Christopher?C. Berger, H.?Henrik Ehrsson. Mental Imagery Changes Multisensory Perception. Current Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.012

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

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/SDPHCPJBUGM/130627125156.htm

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The Xbox One and live TV -- here's what to expect

What's in a name? A whole lot, if you're asking yours truly. "All Your Entertainment. Input One." Such intriguing statements were declared in a document that leaked from Redmond last summer. The slogan "All in one, input one" was on the Microsoft banners decorating the LA Convention Center for E3 this year. But this probably left many wondering: what is "input one," exactly? It didn't go unnoticed by those who follow the TV industry. Input one is commonly used in the biz to refer to the TV input most Americans use to access the majority of their content. This is the input that's displayed when the TV is turned on, and it's the input that most connect their set-top box from their cable or satellite provider to. Naturally, it's a highly coveted position in the content industry and one that is well fortified by the incumbents.

Microsoft has had its sights on input one for a long time, and this particular go-round isn't all that unfamiliar. The Xbox One intends to share input one in what I'd call a man-in-the-middle attack. How well it works won't be revealed until later this year, but clicking through will reveal how I think it'll play out, why this attempt is a direct result of industry constraints and finally, how it matches up with the competition.

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/19/xbox-one-live-tv-microsoft-history-what-to-expect/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Surprise Hossa scratch part of NHL injury culture

BOSTON (AP) ? Marian Hossa is one of the Chicago Blackhawks' top scorers, with three game-winning goals already this postseason.

And then, suddenly, he wasn't in the lineup for a team that needed all the scoring it can get.

Hossa's surprise scratch from Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals ? and the one-word explanation, "upper," for the part of his body that was injured ? is part of a long-running cat-and-mouse game NHL teams play on the theory that any information about injuries is a competitive disadvantage.

"I think that's self-explanatory," said Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville, declining to explain why he declined to explain the secrecy surrounding Hossa's injury.

Tuukka Rask stopped 28 shots from the depleted Blackhawks to help the Bruins win 2-0 on Monday night and move two wins from their second Stanley Cup title in three seasons. Game 4 is Wednesday night in Boston before the series returns to Chicago for a fifth game.

Hossa is expected to play in Game 4, Quenneville allowed, but only after making clear that "I'm not going to get exactly what the injury is or where it occurred."

"It's sort of a secret society in the hockey world and in the injury world," Blackhawks forward Dave Bolland said. "You don't want other teams having any injury information at all."

Asked if he had seen Hossa or had a chance to talk to him, Bolland said, "I don't know."

You don't know if you've seen him or talked to him?

"I don't know if I've seen him," Bolland repeated with a sly smile.

Hossa's mysterious injury may have been a turning point in Game 3, but it is hardly unusual in the secretive world of hockey injuries. Players and coaches say they just don't talk about what's hurting, partly because they don't want to seem weak in a sport where they hit each other for a living.

But mostly, they don't want let the other team know where to aim.

"If I'm going out to battle and I have an injury to any part of my body, I don't want the other side to know what it is," Bruins forward Shawn Thornton said.

Injury information can also help the opponent strategize. Quenneville was so concerned about giving the Bruins advance notice of even a few minutes that he didn't let substitute Ben Smith skate in the warmup even though there was a chance he would need to play.

"I just didn't want to tip our hand that there's something going on," the coach said.

"Ben was ready. I knew he was doing everything," Quenneville said. "We were hopeful that Hoss was playing, and Ben was doing everything to get ready. He was ready."

It worked.

"I'm still surprised," Thornton said. "I don't know what happened to him."

No hard feelings, Bruins coach Claude Julien said. After all, he would do ? and has done ? the same thing.

"I respect that from other teams. When you're playing against each other, you know exactly where everybody is coming from," Julien said.

"There's times where you have to protect your players, and I understand it. I know it's frustrating for you guys as media. You're trying to share that information. The most important thing for us, we can take the heat for that, is protecting your players."

So, how to tell if an injury is minor?

When a team actually admits it exists.

"I'll share one with you: Yesterday in a warmup, Zdeno Chara fell down, got a cut over the eye," Julien said, making light of the mishap in the way that only a coach two wins from an NHL title will do. "I'll let you know about that. That's not a hidden injury.

"If it's something that doesn't put your player in danger, I don't see why you shouldn't talk about it," he said.

Players say they don't have to be told not to discuss injuries; it's as much a part of the culture as Canadian accents and playoff beards. Blackhawks forward Patrick Sharp said he doesn't remember when he first learned the subject was off-limits, but it was long before he reached the NHL.

And hockey players are not alone.

"It's not just here," Thornton said. "I don't think Bill Belichick is (listing) all the injuries they have, either."

But even the notoriously uncommunicative New England Patriots coach is required by NFL rules to say what body part is injured. NHL coaches have to narrow it only to "upper body" or "lower body," which means a player with a concussion and one with a broken finger would have the same diagnosis.

During the playoffs, information is even scarcer.

"It's that time of year where everybody's kind of battling. I would say that not just injuries, strategy, all that kind of information we're not going to talk about," Sharp said. "It's all part of being this close to the ultimate goal."

And does he have any injuries he cares to mention?

"No comment."

___

Follow Jimmy Golen on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/jgolen

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/surprise-hossa-scratch-part-nhl-injury-culture-211012770.html

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