A man who stripped down to his underwear and crawled across a frozen river to rescue his trapped dog has been condemned by firefighters.
According to an eyewitness, the man fell into the River Stour, in Dedham, Essex, at about 10:00 GMT on Sunday but managed to climb out with the animal.
Fellow dog walker Paul Wenborne, who witnessed the incident, described it as a "foolish act of bravery".
An Essex Fire Service spokesman said: "This was extremely dangerous."
Fish porter Mr Wenborne, 52, of Rayleigh, Essex, said he was amazed at the man's actions.
'Stripped down'"I was with two friends and we couldn't believe what we were seeing," he said.
"He stripped down to his pants and started crawling across the ice.
"About a yard or so from the dog, he fell in but managed to get hold of the dog and put it on the ice.
"He then had to swim two or three yards and then crawl back on the ice to dry land.
"He put his clothes back on and carried on. It was a foolish act of bravery."
Essex Fire Service confirmed it was not called to the incident.
Last week, Essex assistant divisional officer Stuart McMillan issued a warning about icy lakes and ponds.
"Even though this ice appears to be strong it can be eggshell thin and anyone who falls through into the water below could get trapped under the ice and would only be able to survive for minutes in the freezing water," he said.
"The most common cause is people chasing their dogs out on to the ice, and I urge people not to do this.
"It isn't worth the risk. Dogs will normally make it safely off the ice and back to the shore - the same cannot be said for people."
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On Feb. 1 at the Lone Star Regional in Houston, Zach Garrison of Spring, Tex., set a new mark at 9 years, 2 months and 7 days. Will this stand forever?
Zach first watched his parents, David and Kristy Garrison, playing with his older sisters, Danielle and Samantha. Then, when he learned about Jeng, he decided he wanted to play bridge. So in 2010 his parents started to teach him and his younger sister, Sarah. At the beginning Zach couldn’t go to the bridge club because his hands were so small that he had difficulty getting his cards out of a duplicate board and sorting them.
With practice at home, though, he began to play with his mother in the 299er games at the Bridge Club of Houston. During one of those deals he was passing while the other three players were bidding. On the next round he placed the Stop card onto the table (which was supposed to mean that he was about to make a jump bid), then he passed. Afterward, when asked why he had used the Stop card, he said that he wanted his mother to stop bidding.
Zach started his serious run at the Life Master title with the 2011 Houston Regional. He studied all aspects of the game, finding them equally fascinating.
The diagramed deal was played last month during a Junior Fund game in Houston. It was sent in by North, Duane Friedrich of Houston.
After East opened one club, Zach (South) could have been expected to overcall one no-trump, but he passed. Then, when Friedrich (North) balanced with one diamond, Zach jumped to three no-trump.
West led the spade eight (second-highest from a weak suit, not treating the ten as an honor). East won with the king and returned a spade to dummy’s ace. (To hold South to nine tricks East had to shift to a low heart, a very hard play to find.)
Declarer ran dummy’s club nine, West taking the queen and returning a spade. Now South cashed the diamond winners to reach the position pictured above, at bottom.
On the diamond jack East threw the heart queen, and declarer discarded his low heart. Then, knowing exactly what he was doing, Zach played a club to the ten and exited with the heart king to endplay East.
Zach had taken two spades, five diamonds and three clubs. Plus 430 was a cold top.
An experienced expert would have been very happy with that play. For a 9-year-old it was wonderful.
Watch out for Zach Garrison in the future.
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Hackers have claimed responsibility for making the CIA website inaccessible on Friday - the latest attack on a US federal agency.
A Twiter post on a feed used by hackers' collective Anonymous said "CIA Tango down", a phrase used by the US Special Forces after killing an enemy.
Anonymous said in another tweet that just because it reported a hack, that did not mean it carried out the attack.
This would not be the first time the CIA website has been put offline.
In June 2011, a group affiliated with Anonymous, Lulz Security, temporarily brought down the agency's homepage.
The CIA site remained offline on Friday evening after several hours, and a spokeswoman said the agency was looking into the reports.
Hackers usually target such websites through a denial-of-service attack, which involves bombarding the site with traffic until its servers are overwhelmed.
There is no suggestion that the security of the CIA's actual computer systems have been compromised.
Earlier this month, Anonymous managed to intercept a conference call between the FBI and British police as they discussed legal action against hackers.
And following the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing website last month, a statement attributed to Anonymous claimed responsibility for shutting down the websites of the Department of Justice and FBI, among others.
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Syria has "categorically rejected" an Arab League resolution calling for a joint Arab-UN peacekeeping mission to end the country's 11-month conflict.
Yusuf Ahmed, Syria's envoy in Cairo, said the plan "reflected the hysteria of these governments".
Russia said it was studying the proposal but Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said violence must end before peacekeepers could be sent.
The UN General Assembly is set for a key debate on the crisis in Syria.
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, who has been sharply critical of the actions of President Bashar al-Assad's government, is expected to address the assembly.
Earlier, the Arab League said it was ending all diplomatic co-operation with Syria, and promised to give "political and material support" to the opposition.
he league's moves come a week after a UN Security Council resolution on Syria, which would have endorsed a previous Arab League peace initiative, was vetoed by Russia and China.
The BBC's Jeremy Bowen in Cairo says the new resolution contains the toughest language on Syria by the Arab League so far and makes it much more likely that the issue will return to the Security Council.
The fact that they are considering these moves shows the extent of the Syrian regime's isolation, our correspondent adds.
But, he says, it remains to be seen whether Moscow will continue to lend its support to its old allies and trading partners.
The League's resolution also formally ends the observer mission it sent to Syria in December. It was suspended in January amid criticism that it was ineffective in the face of continuing violence.
The head of that mission, the controversial Sudanese General Mohammed al-Dabi, had submitted his resignation on Sunday.
Earlier, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri backed the Syrian uprising in a video message, telling the opposition not to rely on the West or Arab countries for support.
There have been reports that US officials suspect al-Qaeda involvement in two deadly blasts in the second city of Aleppo last week.
Meanwhile, fresh violence in the Syrian city of Homs was reported on Monday.
"Tank shelling has been non-stop on Baba Amr and the bombardment on al-Waer [district] began overnight," activist Mohammad al-Hassan told Reuters.
Following a brief lull in fighting, at least four people were killed in Baba Amr on Sunday, the Syrian Observatory on Human Rights said.
At least 35 were reported dead on Saturday.
Activists say more than 400 people have been killed since security forces launched an assault on opposition-held areas on the city this month.
Human rights groups say more than 7,000 have died throughout Syria since last March. The government says at least 2,000 members of the security forces have been killed combating "armed gangs and terrorists".
Syria restricts access to foreign media and it is not possible to verify casualty figures.
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Video game sales slumped in the US - their biggest market - in January.
NPD group said stores sold $1.14bn (£720m) worth of games over the month, down 34% on the previous year. It added that hardware sales were down 38%.
The consumer data provider linked the drop to a lack of major new releases.
Other analysts also pointed to worries about the economy and said this might have an impact on the upcoming launch of Sony's PlayStation Vita console.
NPD said that Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was the month's best-selling title. It was followed by Just Dance 3, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and NBA 2K12.
Microsoft's Xbox 360 held onto its title as the top selling hardware platform for the sixth month running.
"While the lack of new launches was a major reason for software declines, games which launched in the last three months of 2011 also performed poorly in January 2012, down 31% in units compared to fourth quarter launches in January 2011," NPD analyst Liam Callahan added.
"As shoppers were not drawn to stores due to new launch activity, this potentially impacted additional software purchases made on impulse."
The video games news website, IGN, said it had noted a similar drop-off in activity in the UK market. It said sales should pick up when Mass Effect 3 goes on sale in March, but noted that shoppers were worried.
"You can't really deny that the economy is a factor," Keza MacDonald, the firm's UK games editor, told the BBC.
"The lack of big new releases is just a tiny bit of the picture. The fact people are buying less games shows up in the US, European and Japanese data.
"People are just buying fewer games because they have less money to spend. The data before Christmas was also not particularly strong."
Vita's challengeThe news comes as Sony prepares the global launch of its new PlayStation Vita games console. The device goes on sale across Europe, Australia and the Americas on 22 February.
Analysts at IHS Screen Digest have forecast 7 million units will be sold by the end of the year. They say that would be 25% less than what its predecessor the PlayStation Portable System achieved over its initial roll-out.
"I think there is a segment of the population - potentially a narrowing segment - which is still engaged by specialist devices such as handheld consoles," said the firm's head of games, Piers Harding-Rolls.
"But it is a very price-driven situation and part of that equation is definitely the content on offer.
"Sony has hit the mark with a strong line-up at launch which should drive strong initial sales, but there's the potential that demand will drop off quite significantly after the first few weeks."
Industry watchers note that the console will have to compete for attention with Apple's latest iPad which the Wall Street Journal suggests will launch in March.
"A lot of the market for handheld gaming was kids and that market has completely shifted to iPhones, Android phones and touchscreen tablets," said Ms MacDonald.
"The Vita is a nice bit of kit - it has gadget appeal - but I'm not sure it has mainstream appeal."
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Scientists have shown how some cells in the body can repel attacks from HIV by starving the virus of the building blocks of life.
Viruses cannot replicate on their own; they must hijack other cells and turn them into virus production factories.
A study, published in Nature Immunology, showed how some parts of the immune system destroy their own raw materials, stopping HIV.
It is uncertain whether this could be used in therapy, experts caution.
HIV attacks the immune system and can weaken the body's defences to the point that everyday infections become fatal.
However, not all parts of the immune system become subverted to the virus' cause. Macrophages and dendritic cells, which have important roles in orchestrating the immune response, seem to be more resistant.
Raw materialsLast year researchers identified the protein SAMHD1 as being a critical part of this resistance. Now scientists believe they know how it works.
They have shown that SAMHD1 breaks down the building blocks of DNA. So if a cell needs to make a copy of itself it will have a pool of these building blocks - deoxynucleoside triphosphates or dNTPs - which make the new copies of the DNA. However, they can also be used by viruses.
The study, by an international team of researchers, showed that SAMHD1 lowered the levels of dNTPs below that needed to build viral DNA and prevented infection. When they removed SAMHD1 then those cells had higher levels of dNTPs and were infected by HIV.
The report said: "By depleting the pool of available dNTPs, SAMHD1 effectively starves the virus of a building block that is central to its replication strategy."
It is possible for macrophages and dendritic cells to produce SAMHD1 as they are "mature cells" which do not go on to produce new cells.
Prof Baek Kim, one of the researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center, said: "It makes sense that a mechanism like this is active in macrophages.
"Macrophages literally eat up dangerous organisms, and you don't want those organisms to have available the cellular machinery needed to replicate and macrophages themselves don't need it, because they don't replicate.
"So macrophages have SAMHD1 to get rid of the raw material those organisms need to copy themselves. It's a great host defence."
Dr Jonathan Stoye, virologist at the Medical Research Council National Institute of Medical Research, was part of the team which determined the chemical structure of SAMHD1 last year and predicted that it would attack the dNTPs.
"We hypothesised that it works in this fashion and the paper tells us we were right. It is depleting cells of these dNTPs, in cells which are not proliferating (dividing)."
However, some cells do need to divide to boost numbers as part of the immune defence. Such as CD4 cells which are the prime target for HIV infection.
"Cells which are proliferating would be in trouble if we took dNTPs away," Dr Stoye said.
He added: "How we can use the anti-retroviral action of this protein is not clear to me."
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On Sunday, the job of making the argument for job-creation measures now and budget austerity later fell to Jacob J. Lew, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff and until recently his budget director, who made the rounds of five television talk shows.
“There’s pretty broad agreement that the time for austerity is not today. We need to go on a path where, over the next several years, we bring our deficit under control,” Mr. Lew said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “Right now we have a recovery that’s taking root, and if we were to put in austerity measures right now, it would take the economy in the wrong way.”
“The challenge,” Mr. Lew added, “is how do you do two things at the same time? How do you put money forward for things like the payroll tax holiday, for things like getting a jump-start on infrastructure, for building schools, and make the decisions for long-term deficit reduction? The president has proposed a plan that would do that.”
That combination — temporary, immediate stimulus measures, together with spending cuts and tax increases that would take effect only after 2012, when the economy presumably is stronger — is one that many economists and business leaders endorse. But as Mr. Obama starts his fourth year in office, explaining the two-track approach continues to test him and his administration.
In his budget Mr. Obama again will commit to $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years, including $1.5 trillion in tax revenue from the wealthy and from closing some corporate tax breaks, and reductions in spending for a range of programs, including the military, Medicare, farm subsidies and federal pensions. But Republicans are sure to criticize the president’s proposals as heavy on gimmickry and double-counting, and reject his proposed tax increases.
For all the debate over deficits, Mr. Obama on Monday will highlight spending increases and tax cuts that he seeks, which are popular despite their impact on the federal debt.
He will start the year’s debate by releasing his budget plan outside Washington at Northern Virginia Community College, part of a statewide coalition of community colleges and employers that was among the first winners in September of federal grants to ensure that students are learning skills that businesses need. In his budget, Mr. Obama proposes to make that initiative an $8 billion multiyear effort.
The initiative is one of many — both temporary measures and programs intended to be permanent — that serve as a statement of Mr. Obama’s priorities in promoting government investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, education and job training, and innovation, even as he calls for considerable deficit reduction to counter the nation’s mounting debt.
Presidents of both parties typically do much the same, going into great detail about the budget’s winners and leaving the losers vague or unspoken. What makes Mr. Obama’s effort stand out is the sheer size of the proposed deficit reduction as the nation emerges from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis that resulted in lower revenue for the Treasury and large doses of temporary spending and tax cuts to keep the economy from collapse.
In Congress, Democrats and Republicans continue to negotiate over a package that would extend a temporary two-percentage-point cut in workers’ payroll taxes through this year, along with unemployment compensation for those out of work for more than six months and a delay in a scheduled deep reduction in Medicare reimbursements to doctors.
“I do believe this will be extended,” Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, said on the ABC program “This Week.” The two sides are split over how to offset the cost of the package, but lawmakers who worked over the weekend reported making progress.
The Obama budget request for fiscal year 2013, which begins Oct. 1, reflects the White House agreement with Congress last August to cut nearly $1 trillion over 10 years from annual discretionary spending, which covers most government programs but not the entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, whose costs, especially for the health programs, are driving the long-term projections of unsustainable debt.
In a summary of the budget released on Friday, the administration said “difficult trade-offs had to be made” to comply with the reduced levels of discretionary spending and still provide increases for the president’s priorities. But it did not disclose who got cut, only what was increased or newly created.
Congress is not likely to accept much of Mr. Obama’s budget, given Republicans’ opposition. Its value is more as a political document as he fights for re-election, contrasting his approach to the other party’s.
Mr. Obama will propose spending $476 billion over six years for transportation projects. Because federal fuel taxes will not cover the cost, he proposes to offset about half the cost with savings projected over 10 years from ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Republicans and some budget groups call that a gimmick, saying much of the money would not be spent anyway.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Lew countered, “I think that if we don’t lower the caps that permit that spending, there will be a natural process of seeing military spending grow.” He added, “I guarantee you that if we don’t take the action that’s been proposed, there will be leakage, and that money will end up being spent.”
Mr. Obama will propose $141 billion in spending for research and development over all, increasing nondefense research by 5 percent above the current level and maintaining his commitment to double the budgets of three federal research agencies.
Among new initiatives, Mr. Obama seeks a $5 billion competitive program to encourage states, school districts and teachers’ unions to coordinate in attracting and training more teachers, a new one-year tax credit for small businesses that increase their payroll, and tax incentives for manufacturers that bring jobs back from overseas or invest in depressed communities.
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