Front and back cover of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938, featuring the debut of Superman.



A rare 75-year-old comic book featuring the debut of Superman found in a Minnesota home's wall fetched $175,000 at auction, comic book seller Comicconnect.com said on Wednesday.

The identity of the buyer in the online auction, which ended Tuesday, was not disclosed. The comic book, Action Comics No. 1 from June 1938, was the first appearance of the all-American superhero by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster.

It had been estimated to sell for about $100,000, Comicconnect.com CEO Stephen Fishler said, adding that there are about 100 remaining copies of the 250,000 original copies.

“It's so noteworthy because it was a historic milestone,” Fishler said. “There was no such thing as a superhero or a man in costume.”

The comic book was sold by building contractor David Gonzalez, who discovered it among newspapers used as insulation in a wall during a home renovation in Hoffman, Minnesota, about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

Gonzalez bought the vacant 1938 home for $10,100, said Fishler.

The book's condition was graded 1.5 out of 10 because its back cover was accidentally ripped shortly after it was found.

“Conservatively, that's a $50,000 tear, but probably more,” Fishler said.

A mint condition copy of Action Comics No. 1 would command about $3 million, according to Fishler. A 9.5 graded copy of Action Comics No. 1 sold for $2.16 million in 2011.

Superman gets a big-screen reboot in the movie “Man of Steel,” which opens Friday in North America.


Spy agency chief says taps
prevented dozens of attacks


The head of the National Security Agency told a U.S. congressional panel on Wednesday that dozens of terrorist attacks have been prevented thanks to a recently revealed surveillance program that has raised concerns about privacy.

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, appeared before a Senate panel looking into cybersecurity threats.
 
But a number of senators appeared more concerned about a secret surveillance program that has been mining Americans’ telephone and Internet data.
 
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont asked the NSA chief how many attacks had been thwarted by data collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was signed into law shortly after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
 
Alexander: It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent.

Leahy: Ok, so dozens.  Now we collect millions of millions of millions of records through 215, but dozens of them have proved crucial, or critical, is that right?  Dozens?

Alexander: For both here and abroad, in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks.”

Leahy: Out of those millions, dozens have been critical.”

Alexander: That’s correct.
 
The questioning came after details of the program were leaked by a government contractor.
 
Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois pointed out that the contractor, Edward Snowden, was a 29-year-old high school dropout who had worked as a security guard at the NSA.  Durbin said he wanted to look at that resume.

“And ask you if you’re troubled that he was given that kind of opportunity to be so close to important information that was critical to the security of our nation,” Durbin said.

“I do have concerns about that, over the process, Senator.  I have great concerns over that, the access that he had, Alexander said.
 
Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command, promised to declassify some information in the coming days to show that the surveillance programs are working lawfully and in the national interest.
 
“This is not us doing something under the covers, this is what we’re doing on behalf of all of us, for the good of this country.  Now, what we need to do, I think, is to bring as many facts as we can out to the American people," Alexander said.
 
Several lawmakers said that U.S. intelligence agencies are engaged in a cyber war and need, as one of them put it, “a little space.”


Books on totalitarian states
become popular products


“1984,” George Orwell’s classic novel of a future gone wrong is seeing a spike in sales in the wake of the news this past week that the U.S. government operates a vast surveillance program monitoring phone calls and Internet use to track down possible terrorists.

Several editions of the book, which is about an omnipresent and totalitarian surveillance state, were among Amazon.com’s top 200 sellers as of June 11. “1984” was first published in 1949 and has been required reading in many high schools and colleges ever since.

The book also provided the theme for a famous television commercial introducing the Apple company’s first Macintosh computer in 1984.

Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” another futuristic novel in which individuality is crushed by an omnipresent government, also has had increased sales on the online bookseller and was reported out of stock.

Orwell’s “1984” book was mentioned by President Barack Obama last Friday when he defended the NSA surveillance programs.

"In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance,” the president said.


15 arrests in cyber scheme
that took at least $15 million


Federal prosecutors in New Jersey on Wednesday unveiled criminal charges against eight people accused of trying to steal at least $15 million from U.S. customers in an international cybercrime scheme targeting accounts at 15 financial institutions and government agencies.
 
U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said the conspiring hackers gained unauthorized access to computer networks, diverted customer funds to bank accounts and pre-paid debit cards and used helpers to make ATM withdrawals and fraudulent purchases in Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and elsewhere.
 
Among the entities targeted were Automatic Data Processing, Inc, Citigroup, Inc, eBay Inc's PayPal, JPMorgan Chase & Co, TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and the U.S. Department of Defense, Fishman said.
 
The charges come as law enforcement officials crack down on cybercrime heists. This has included arrests announced last week of 11 people in the United States, United Kingdom and Vietnam in a worldwide credit card fraud ring, and a May raid on Liberty Reserve, a Costa Rica company that provided a virtual currency system to move money without using traditional banking.
 
The alleged ringleader of the latest scheme was Oleksiy Sharapka, 33, of Kiev, Ukraine, who was helped by Leonid Yanovitsky, 38, also of Kiev, according to federal prosecutors.
 
Other defendants are Oleg Pidtergerya, 49, of Brooklyn, New York; Robert Dubuc, 40, of Malden, Massachusetts, and Andrey Yarmolitskiy, 41, of Atlanta, who prosecutors said managed crews in their areas.
 
Richard Gundersen, 46, of Brooklyn and Lamar Taylor, 37, of Salem, Massachusetts, were accused of working for Pidtergerya and Dubuc, respectively, while Ilya Ostapyuk, 31, of Brooklyn, allegedly helped move fraud proceeds, court papers show.
 
In a court filing a Secret Service agent described the scheme, including an email about an ultimately thwarted transfer from an ADP account, where Sharapka told Dubuc: “You can do the same thing with the rest of the regular cards, so I can activate them and start giving them to guys to put money on, because we are losing time again.”
 
Prosecutors charged the eight defendants with three conspiracy counts: wire fraud, money laundering and identity theft. Each defendant faces as much as 20 years in prison on the first two counts and up to 15 years on the third.
 
“Cybercriminals penetrated some of our most trusted financial institutions,” Fishman said in a statement. “Today's charges and arrests take out key members of the organization, including leaders of crews in three states that used those stolen identities to cash out hacked accounts in a series of internationally coordinated modern-day bank robberies.”
 
Fishman said Dubuc, Ostapyuk, Pidtergerya and Yarmolitskiy were arrested this week, Gunderson and Taylor are being pursued and Sharapka and Yanovitsky remain at large.
 
Igor Niman, a lawyer for Ostapyuk, declined immediate comment. Lawyers for the other defendants could not be located.
 
TD Ameritrade said it cooperated with authorities, adding that its case involved a client whose credentials were obtained outside its network and that its systems were not breached or hacked.
 
ADP, Citigroup, JPMorgan, PayPal and the Department of Defense either declined immediate comment or were not immediately available for comment.
 

Glitter seems to be coming off
Brazil's World Cup image


All but diehard fans of international soccer could be forgiven for not knowing, much less caring, about the Confederations Cup, a two-week tournament that kicks off in Brazil Saturday.
 
For 200 million Brazilians, though, the competition is the first in a series of big events that will say a lot about their country, their first-world ambitions and the government's ability, amid fading confidence in Latin America's biggest economy, to deliver on the promise of a Brazil transformed.
 
The Confederations Cup, an eight-team competition, will  serve as a dress rehearsal for two far bigger shows on Brazilian soil: the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.
 
When it won rights to host those events, Brazil was on a tear. They were supposed to showcase a country that in the century's first decade channeled booming export revenue, soaring consumer demand and ambitious social programs into economic growth that catapulted over 30 million people out of poverty.
 
But now, at showtime, Brazil has lost its luster.
 
Economic stagnation, rising inflation and a spike in the sorts of violent crimes that were supposed to recede with prosperity are reviving questions, asked here for decades, about how far Brazil has actually traveled on the difficult path from emerging nation into the ranks of developed countries.
 
As the Confederations Cup gets going, in six of the dozen cities that will host the World Cup, many Brazilians fear visitors will see anything but a country in full bloom.
 
“We've been eating baloney and burping caviar,” says Juca Kfouri, a prominent sportswriter and commentator, using a local expression for pretense outpacing reality. “These events are now upon us and this is the same old Brazil.”
 
Sports fans, the government says, can rest assured.
 
Naysayers, after all, routinely predict disaster before every major sporting event, be it here or in the world's richest countries. They quibble over everything from Olympic mascots to the design of the World Cup ball.
 
And the show, invariably, proceeds.
 
“We have no fears of not being ready,” Aldo Rebelo, Brazil's sports minister, said this week, citing ongoing work to finish remaining World Cup venues by a December deadline and expand crowded airport terminals in time to welcome visitors.
 
Still, critics are outraged by cost overruns, construction delays, a perceived lack of transparency and quickly rising prices for tickets and tourism related to the events.
 
Work at the MaracanIa, the Rio stadium that for half a century was one of the temples of global soccer, took so long that it will host Confederations Cup games with its exterior and much of the surrounding area still a construction site.
 
Then there's the questionable practicality of new stadiums in far-flung cities, including the farm hub of Cuiaba and the Amazonian capital of Manaus, that don't even have top-tier soccer teams let alone a place on the concert circuit organizers say will ensure they don't morph into white elephants.
 
In a recent report, the Federal Accounts Tribunal, an agency that probes public spending, calculated that World Cup costs have already exceeded an initial budget of about 24 billion reais ($11.2 billion) by at least 15 percent.

Organizers for the Olympics, to be held in and around Rio, haven't even disclosed an official budget, though they concede it will cost far more than the 29 billion reais estimated when Rio bid for the games.
 
What bothers many the most is that Brazil, despite lofty ambitions early on, gave up on many of the grand designs it proposed for the big events, from a bullet train between Sao Paulo and Rio to rapid transit systems in smaller cities.
 
Romario, the superstar striker who won the 1994 World Cup with Brazil and is now a legislator in Congress, has taken to the assembly floor to decry squandered time and resources.
 
“Brazilians will be disappointed to have lost yet another good opportunity to make this country a better place to live,” he predicted recently.
 
The assessment comes as a spate of bad news undermines much of the confidence that Brazil had just a few years ago.
 
After posting economic growth of 7.5 percent as recently as 2010, the country last year grew by just 0.9 percent. A worsening outlook for 2013, combined with rising inflation and a deterioration of public finances, last week led ratings agency Standard & Poor's to warn it could downgrade Brazil's debt.
 
The woes caused President Dilma Rousseff, who has enjoyed high approval ratings since she took office in 2011, to slip in two recent polls. Meanwhile, a series of high-profile rapes and assaults in Rio and Sao Paulo, where violent crimes have spiked by more than 10 percent in three years, is prompting citizens to wonder whether security is slipping, too.
 
Yet Brazil is unlikely to don a dour face for visitors.
 
The government recently launched an advertising campaign that asked Brazilians to flaunt their diversity, creativity and hospitality and “show what it means to be Brazilian”.
 
Globo, the dominant TV network, has run a series of spots during a weekly news show illustrating problems that foreigners face when they arrive - from confusing signs at airports to limited foreign language skills among Brazilians to aggressive street vendors who swarm them at popular tourist attractions.
 
As it lays out the welcome mat, some fear Brazil is slamming the door on itself.
 
High demand for hotel rooms and airline seats means many locals can't afford to travel during the events. And the need to recoup costly stadium investments means high ticket prices that exclude workaday soccer fans from enjoying the national sport.
 
After the re-inauguration of the MaracanIa earlier this month, many longtime visitors remarked on the homogenous, mostly white, audience and a staid public compared with the raucous crowds of games past.
 
TostIao, a legendary forward who is now a columnist for the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, after the game lamented “the elitization of soccer across Brazil”.


Soccer maneuver of heading
shown to cause brain damage


Heading the ball, a popular move in soccer in which players use their heads to hit and direct the ball, can cause brain injuries, according to a new study.  Researchers say frequent heading can result in mild brain trauma and memory problems similar to concussion.

Soccer is the world’s most popular amateur sport.  It is enjoyed and played seriously as a hobby by an estimated one-quarter of a billion people of all ages around the world.  But there’s concern that repeatedly heading the ball, which travels at speeds up to 80 kilometers per hour, can result in brain damage. 

Researchers at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University studied the brains of 37 amateur players selected from around the New York City area.  All played soccer as a hobby for an average of 22 years, practicing two times a week and playing a competitive match at least once a week.

Michael Lipton, director of the school’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center, says investigators assessed how much heading each player had done for 12 months.  The participants also took a series of tests that measured memory and brain function, and researchers used a high-tech MRI machine to scan the participants' brains.  They wanted to see whether the amount of heading in each player was related to microscopic structural changes in the brain and performance on the memory tests.

Investigators found that players who headed the ball 1,500 times per year or less had significantly less damage such as lacerations to white matter - fatty tissue that covers the brain - which contains nerve fibers called axons.

“But as you get to a higher level and cross a threshold, there is a sudden increase in the likelihood that we are going to find both changes in the brain tissue as well as worse function on our psychological tests, especially tests of memory, related to that increased heading,” Lipton said.

Lipton says mild brain changes and memory impairment similar to what is seen in concussions was seen in players who headed the ball 1,550 times or more per year, while players who headed the ball more than 1,800 times had the worst memory scores.

Experts say most damage comes from practices where the average player may hit the ball with his head 30 or more times.  During games, soccer players head butt anywhere from six to 12 times.

Helmets used in American football have been shown to be effective at preventing skull fractures and bleeding in the brain, according to Lipton.  But he says protective head gear is not likely to help with the type of brain injury caused by heading.

“The type of injury that we are looking at here is due to rapid acceleration and deceleration or rotation of the brain inside the skull, sort of your brain sloshing around inside the skull as it moves,” Lipton said.

Researchers will now try to determine the effect of heading in players of different ages and in different countries.

The study on the effect of heading in amateur soccer players is published in the journal Radiology.