Timeliness - The article was published about 30 minutes before I started writing this and was the newest article.
Proximity - The article is about UT Austin, and most of the people that read the Austin American Statesman probably live in Austin, so the news is close to them.
UT regents likely to spend $45.8M
University of Texas System regents are expected on Thursday to tap the system’s endowment for $45.8 million to underwrite three high-priority initiatives, including creating a statewide telemedicine network that would allow patients in rural areas to get specialty care without driving hundreds of miles.
The Board of Regents, meeting in Galveston, is also poised to approve spending intended to boost research at four universities, as well as to recruit and retain outstanding faculty members at all 14 health and academic campuses.
The three initiatives are among the top priorities of system Chancellor Bill McRaven , which makes it all but certain that the board will grant approval during its meeting at the UT Medical Branch in Galveston. The initiatives would be underwritten by the Permanent University Fund, a multi-billion-dollar higher education endowment overseen by the board.
The proposed UT System Virtual Health Network would be seeded with $10.8 million in endowment proceeds over four years for equipment and technical support. It would build on the system’s existing telemedicine capabilities for providing specialty care through advanced video conferencing. UTMB physicians have practiced telemedicine for more than 20 years, delivering health services remotely to Texas prison inmates, offshore oil workers, researchers in Antarctica and others. UTMB has logged an annual average of 99,000 physician-to-patient telemedicine encounters in recent years.
Raymond Greenberg, the system’s executive vice chancellor for health affairs, said in an interview that the proposed network would make it possible for a specialist in one location to see a patient accompanied by his primary care doctor or other health care provider in another location. The specialist can hear the patient’s heartbeat and can have the health care provider perform tests and some hands-on examination, Greenberg said.
“Texas should really be the poster child for telemedicine with its huge geographic distances and concentrations of where the specialists are,” Greenberg said.
The UT System’s six health campuses would participate in the network, and, when they come on line, so would new medical schools at UT-Austin and UT-Rio Grande Valley. The health campuses of the Texas A&M University System, the Texas Tech University System and the University of North Texas System could also participate, he said.
The faculty funding initiative would provide $30 million in endowment-backed bond proceeds for recruiting and retaining professors. That would be on top of $30 million previously approved by the regents in the current budget under the program, dubbed Faculty STARs, for Science and Technology Acquisition and Retention.
The initiative, established by the regents in 2004, focused initially on established researchers, but expanded in 2010 to include entry-level candidates, dubbed Rising STARs. The money may be used only for lab renovations and research equipment. Under the proposal before the regents, $20 million would be allocated for entry-level faculty members and $10 million for senior researchers.
The latest UT System records show that 210 faculty members were recruited in the first seven years of the STARs program at a cost to the system of $143 million. Those researchers generated $1.3 billion in federal and other funding for research, for a net return on investment of about $1 billion after accounting for partial matching recruitment funds from the campuses, said Patricia Hurn, vice chancellor for research and innovation. System officials are gathering data for an updated report to be presented in August, she said.
(On a separate track, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Wednesday that his office is accepting applications from public universities for grants matched by the universities from the $38 million Governor’s University Research Initiative. The initiative, approved last year by the Legislature, gives top priority to recruiting Nobel laureates and members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.)
The UT regents are expected to allocate $5 million in endowment-backed bonds to improve laboratories and other research infrastructure at UT-Dallas, UT-Arlington, UT-El Paso and UT-San Antonio, all classified by the state as emerging research universities. The funding is intended to stimulate private donations, with larger donations garnering a larger match from the UT System. Since the program was established in 2010, the UT board has doled out $40 million, with UT-Dallas earning the biggest share, $27.9 million.
Found at the Austin American Statesman
Prominence - This story is about the Zika virus, which is a popular topic in many news stories as US citizens begin to worry about it.
State health officials prepare for jump in Zika cases
State health officials said Wednesday that they are preparing for an expected increase in Zika infection cases and warned the public to avoid mosquitoes as temperatures rise.
At least 12 cases of the mosquito-borne virus have been confirmed in the state, including a third in Dallas announced Wednesday and one in Travis County reported last week. All but one of the 12 infected people traveled to Latin America or the Caribbean where the virus, which has been linked to newborns with shrunken heads — microcephaly — and developmental delays as well as paralysis, is spreading. One person in Dallas contracted the virus through sexual contact with a person who visited South America.
John Hellerstedt, commissioner of the state’s health department, told members of the Texas House Public Health Committee that there is no evidence that mosquitoes in Texas carry the Zika virus.
Even so, the state will start testing people suspected of having the virus by mid-February instead of shipping such specimens off to the federal government, he said.
“People can take measures that will protect themselves and their families to a very, very high degree,” Hellerstedt said. Federal experts expect that eventually the virus “will become locally transmitted by mosquito populations in the United States. I think that’s a really important thing to be prepared for,” he said.
Currently, specimens from those possibly infected are sent to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Austin area officials have said that it takes about a week to 10 days to get results. Testing in state will offer results quicker, according to Texas health officials.
Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston are looking into whether Texas mosquitoes can transmit the virus, how pregnant mice are affected and more importantly, a cure for the virus, James Le Duc, director of the branch’s Galveston National Laboratory, told lawmakers Wednesday. The laboratory is one of the few in the world that has the original strain of the Zika virus discovered in Uganda in 1947.
Hellerstedt also said that officials are analyzing the state’s birth defect registry to see whether there is a link between past microcephaly cases and possible Zika cases.
Although the threat now is fairly minimal, health officials warn that the reported cases of Texans contracting Zika will likely rise as the weather becomes warmer and more people travel abroad. If the Zika becomes more widespread in Texas, officials warn people to clear any standing water that might breed mosquitoes, use insect repellent, wear long sleeves and stay indoors during the day when the known Zika-carrying mosquito tends to be more active.
Hellerstedt said that the known Zika-carrying mosquito species isn’t easily killed by aerial sprays, so it must be killed at a close range in a confined area.
Eighty percent of those infected with the virus exhibit few to no symptoms, health officials say. Symptoms include fever, rashes, joint pain and red eyes.
The outbreak abroad prompted the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency last week.
On Monday, President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.8 billion to combat Zika globally and in the U.S. through vaccine and microcephaly research and by expanding mosquito control programs.
Carrie Williams, spokeswoman for the state’s health department, said that officials hope to get a portion of that money if Congress approves Obama’s request.
Found in the Austin American Statesman
Impact - This article directly affects anyone in Europe that uses Google (so mostly everyone).
Google Will Further Block Some European Search Results
In its continuing give-and-take with European privacy regulators,
Google is about to make another change to how people view the company’s search results in Europe.
The American technology giant will soon block access to certain disputed links from all of its domains — including the main United States one,
Google.com — when people in Europe use its online search engine, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The links to be blocked or removed are those that people have successfully petitioned Google or a national regulator to have blocked because of European privacy concerns.
The change, which will go into force by early next month, comes as Google fends off claims that it does not respect Europe’s tough privacy rules.
Google has fought to limit the legal decision to its European search sites like Google.de in Germany. But many of the region’s data protection regulators, particularly in France, have demanded that the company extend the privacy ruling across its worldwide operations, including the removal of links on non-European search sites like Google.com.
To forestall mounting legal disputes, and potential fines, Google has now informed Europe’s national privacy authorities that it will start blocking such links on all of its global domains when they are viewed in the
European Union country where the original claim was made.
As part of the change, when someone succeeds in asking Google to remove or block access to a link for legitimate privacy reasons, the company will remove the linkfrom its European domains and block access to the link from all of its global sites that can be used from the country where the request was submitted, the people said.
In practice, that would mean a successful request from someone in Spain, for example, would lead to the removal of the link from Google’s European online search domains, and blocking access to it from all of its non-European sites — including Google.com — from that specific country. Search results for individuals outside the European Union will not be affected, and links on Google’s non-European domains will still be accessible from other European countries.
Despite Google’s renewed efforts to appease European privacy concerns, it remains unclear whether the company’s actions will be enough to head off the continuing legal disputes from Europe’s national data protection authorities, who want Google to apply the right-to-be-forgotten ruling across its global operations.
The company has said, for example, that only a small fraction of its European users view search results from non-European domains. And since the right-to-be-forgotten decision took effect in May 2014, Google has rejected roughly 60 percent of the 386,000 requests from individuals to block links, according to the company’s
transparency report.
Elsa Trochet-Macé, a spokeswoman for the French privacy authority, said on Thursday that Google had informed Europe’s data protection regulators last month about the coming changes to its search results, but that the French agency had not yet decided whether they meant that Google now complied with Europe’s privacy rules.
“We’re now analyzing the new changes,” Ms. Trochet-Macé said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/technology/google-will-further-block-some-european-search-results.html?ref=world
Conflict - This story is about Russia, America, and Syria being opposing forces to one another.
Russian Intervention in Syrian War Has Sharply Reduced U.S. Options
MUNICH — For months now the United States has insisted there can be no military solution to the Syrian civil war, only a political accord between President
Bashar al-Assad and the fractured, divided opposition groups that have been trying to topple him.
But after days of intense bombing that could soon put the critical city of Aleppo back into the hands of Mr. Assad’s forces, the Russians may be proving the United States wrong. There may be a military solution, one senior American official conceded Wednesday, “just not our solution,” but that of President
Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia.
Mr. Kerry enters the negotiations with very little leverage: The Russians have cut off many of the pathways the C.I.A. has been using for a not-very-secret effort to arm rebel groups, according to several current and former officials. Mr. Kerry’s supporters inside the administration say he has been increasingly frustrated by the low level of American military activity, which he views as essential to bolstering his negotiation effort.
Publicly, Mr. Kerry is circumspect about his dilemma. “We are all very, very aware of how critical this moment is,” he said on Tuesday.
His colleagues in the administration, however, fear that a three-month-long effort to begin the political process is near collapse. If it fails, it will force Mr. Kerry and President Obama, once again, to consider their Plan B: a far larger military effort, directed at Mr. Assad. But that is exactly the kind of conflict that Mr. Obama has spent five years trying to avoid, especially when any ground campaign would rely on forces led by a fractious group of opposition leaders that he distrusts.
Without a political solution or a stepped-up military effort, the United States is not only left with little influence over the course of the Syrian civil war, but without a viable strategy to bring all of the warring parties together to fight the Islamic State.
As Mr. Kerry arrived here for another meeting of the 17 nations that agreed last fall on principles for a political solution, several of Washington’s own allies complained bitterly about American policy, saying the United States is absent while the Russians change the nature of the situation on the ground.
Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, used the announcement of his imminent retirement to poke holes, once again, in the American plan for
Syria, which he called “ambiguous” and absent a “very strong commitment.” Throughout his tenure he has been critical of the United States for not being more aggressive, often to the exasperation of State Department and White House officials, who charged that the French grandstand in public but have been cautious to get into a fight that has no clear outcome.
An open breach erupted with the Turks, who charge that the United States is empowering the Kurds, with whom
Turkey believes it is in an existential struggle. President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s president, denounced Washington for failing to declare a Syrian Kurdish rebel group a terrorist organization.
“Are you on our side or the side of the terrorist P.Y.D. and P.K.K. organizations?” Mr. Erdogan said in an address to provincial officials in the Turkish capital, Ankara, referring to American support for members of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or P.Y.D., in their fight against the Islamic State in Syria, and to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. The United States considers the Kurds the only truly effective fighters against the Islamic State.
Then Mr. Erdogan — president of a NATO member nation — turned to taunts. “Hey, America,” he said. “Because you never recognized them as a terrorist group, the region has turned into a sea of blood.”
At the core of the American strategic dilemma is that the Russian military adventure, which Mr. Obama dismissed last year as ill-thought-out muscle flexing, has been surprising effective in helping Mr. Assad reclaim the central cities he needs to hold power, at least in a rump-state version of Syria.
Testifying on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, offered a sobering picture of Russia’s success, even if it proves a temporary one.
“Putin is the first leader since Stalin to expand Russia’s territory,” he told a Senate committee. In Russia’s first major overseas military effort since its humiliation in Afghanistan 35 years ago, he said, “Its interventions demonstrate the improvements in Russian military capabilities and the Kremlin’s confidence in using them.”
While he predicted Mr. Putin would be challenged to afford the commitment over the long term, especially at a moment of falling oil prices, he offered a bleak assessment for Washington. “In Syria,” he said, “pro-regime forces have the initiative, having made some strategic gains near Aleppo and Latakia in the north, as well as in southern Syria.” While Mr. Assad has “manpower shortages,” he said, at least his forces were unified.
Mr. Obama has been cautious, rejecting a plan, for example, from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the C.I.A. director at the time, David H. Petraeus, to start a large-scale arming of the rebel groups. Instead, the effort has been far more modest, and because even that has been ostensibly secret — though among the worst-kept secrets in Washington — it creates an impression that all the military momentum is on Mr. Putin’s side.
Battle maps from the Institute for the Study of War show, in fact, that it is: The Russians, with Iranian help on the ground, appear to be handing Mr. Assad enough key cities that his government can hang on.
Current and former administration officials say they see a parallel to Mr. Putin’s strategy in Ukraine: He keeps his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, negotiating cease-fires and slow-progressing political accords, while making inroads on the battlefield.
Those inroads have limited Mr. Obama’s options. For example the much discussed “no-fly zone” would now be far harder to enforce, since Russian jets are flying in that airspace.
While the official position of the United States remains that Mr. Assad must leave office, Mr. Kerry and his aides will not say when he must leave, or whether he could participate in the process of selecting a new government. Their talk about finding a quiet exile for the Syrian leader has largely ceased.
As a result, it is hard to discern now what kind of end for Syria is now envisioned by the administration. The political document adopted in Vienna three months ago calls for a single, unified state. That seems A fractured nation — part Alawite, part Sunni, part Kurd — is often discussed, but never officially.
Mr. Kerry is turning to the more immediate questions of cease-fire and humanitarian access. That did not impress Abu Youssef, whose farm in Aleppo Province has been hosting dozens of Syrians displaced by the recent fighting nearby. He asked to be identified only by a nickname for his safety.
“Yes, they will have a cease-fire, but after Aleppo it is finished,” he said in an online chat. “They will close off all of Aleppo, destroy the whole area, and then the Russians will negotiate a cease-fire,” he added. “After winning victory they will negotiate.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/world/middleeast/russian-intervention-in-syrian-war-has-sharply-reduced-us-options.html?ref=world
Human Interest - This story is about religious and racist connotations, which is becoming a popular topic in newspapers.
Sikh American Actor Flies Home to New York Wearing His Turban
A well-known Sikh American actor, Waris Ahluwalia, who was
not allowed to board an airplane in
Mexico City because he refused to remove his turban during a security check, flew home to the United States on Wednesday, ending a two-day standoff with Aeroméxico.
Mr. Ahluwalia, who is also a jewelry designer and a social activist, landed in New York on Wednesday afternoon, after being allowed to board a new flight without removing his turban for a check. He said that he was asked to rub it with his hand, then present his hand for swabbing, which he did. That had been the past security practice, he said.
On Wednesday morning before takeoff, he posted a photograph online of himself inside an aircraft with his arms around the shoulders of what appeared to be two Aeroméxico pilots.
“He told us that the check was smooth,” said Harsimran Kaur, the legal director for the Sikh Coalition, a civil-rights group that worked to resolve the impasse while Mr. Ahluwalia spent two days at the airport.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/world/americas/waris-ahluwalia-sikh-actor-turban-aeromexico-flight-mexico-city.html?ref=world
Novelty - I mean, this is a pretty weird story.
Canada: Another Human Foot Washes Ashore
The British Columbia Coroners Service said Wednesday that it had opened an investigation after a human foot washed up on the province’s shoreline, the 13th since 2007. Like most of the other cases, the current one involves a foot wearing a running shoe. It was found by a hiker on Vancouver Island’s Botanical Beach on Sunday. The coroner’s office said the foot became detached from the body because of “prolonged immersion in water.” The style of the running shoe that was found was first sold in North American stores in March 2013, indicating that the death occurred sometime after that date. The coroner’s office confirmed that 10 of the 12 feet in earlier cases came from seven people who have been identified. It said that foul play was not evident in the other cases.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/world/americas/canada-another-human-foot-washes-ashore.html?ref=world
