Engraved stone contains the name of  the snake queen, Lady Ikoom

Buried monument illuminates
dark period of Mayan culture


Archaeologists tunneling beneath the main temple of the ancient Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ in northern Guatemala have discovered an intricately carved stone monument with hieroglyphic text detailing the exploits of a little-known sixth-century princess whose progeny prevailed in a bloody, back-and-forth struggle between two of the civilization’s most powerful royal dynasties.

“Great rulers took pleasure in describing adversity as a prelude to ultimate success,” said research director David Freidel, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. “Here the Snake queen, Lady Ikoom, prevailed in the end.”

Freidel, who is studying in Paris this summer, said the stone monument, known officially as El Perú Stela 44, offers a wealth of new information about a dark period in Maya history, including the names of two previously unknown Maya rulers and the political realities that shaped their legacies.

“The narrative of Stela 44 is full of twists and turns of the kind that are usually found in time of war but rarely detected in Precolumbian archaeology,” Freidel said.

“The information in the text provides a new chapter in the history of the ancient kingdom of Waka’ and its political relations with the most powerful kingdoms in the Classic period lowland Maya world.”

Carved stone monuments, such as Stela 44, have been unearthed in dozens of other important Maya ruins and each has made a critical contribution to the understanding of Maya culture.

Freidel says that his epigrapher, Stanley Guenter, who deciphered the text, believes that Stela 44 was originally dedicated about 1,450 years ago, in the calendar period ending in  564 A.D., by the Wak dynasty King Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin, a title that translates roughly as “He Who Stands Up the Offering of the Eagle.”

After standing exposed to the elements for more than 100 years, Stela 44 was moved by order of a later king and buried as an offering inside new construction that took place at the main El Perú-Waka’ temple about A.D. 700, probably as part of funeral rituals for a great queen entombed in the building at this time, the research team suggests.

El Perú-Waka’ is about 40 miles west of the famous Maya site of Tikal near the San Pedro Martir River in Laguna del Tigre National Park. In the Classic period, this royal city commanded major trade routes running north to south and east to west.

Freidel has directed research at this site in collaboration with Guatemalan and foreign archaeologists since 2003. Guatemalan archaeologist Griselda Perez discovered Stela 44 in this temple.

The project carries out research under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Guatemala and its Directorate for Cultural and Natural Patrimony, the Council for Protected Areas, and it is sponsored by the Foundation for the Cultural and Natural Patrimony and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Early in March, Ms. Pérez was excavating a short tunnel along the centerline of the stairway of the temple in order to give access to other tunnels leading to a royal tomb discovered in 2012 when her excavators encountered Stela 44.

Once the texts along the side of the monument were cleared, archaeologist Francisco Castaneda took detailed photographs and sent these to Guenter for decipherment.

Guenter’s glyph analysis suggests that Stela 44 was commissioned by Wak dynasty King Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin to honor his father, King Chak Took Ich’aak (Red Spark Claw), who had died in A.D. 556. Stela 44’s description of this royal father-son duo marks the first time their names have been known to modern history.

A new queen, Lady Ikoom, also is featured in the text and she was important to the king who recovered this worn stela and used it again.

Researchers believe that Lady Ikoom was one of two Snake dynasty princesses sent into arranged marriages with the rulers of El Perú-Waka’ and another nearby Maya city as a means of cementing Snake control over this region of northern Guatemala.


Secret U.S. court renews
telephone collection powers


The secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government's authority to continue collecting millions of telephone records, one of the classified counter-terrorism programs that was disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement Friday that the court had reaffirmed the powers.

The surveillance program has seen intense scrutiny since June, when Snowden revealed once-secret information about government telephone monitoring.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers expressed concerns in the last week about the life span of the surveillance program, suggesting that Congress may not renew legislative authority for it when it comes up for review.

Snowden faces criminal charges and is stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport while seeking temporary asylum in Russia.  He has said he wants to eventually head to Latin America, but his lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said that Snowden also could ask for Russian citizenship.

The United States is demanding Russia extradite Snowden to stand trial for espionage.


Helen Thomas, reporter,
dies at 92 in Washington home


Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who covered American presidents for nearly 50 years, has died at the age of 92.

Friends and colleagues say she died early Saturday at her home in Washington.
 
Thomas was a pioneer for women in journalism at a time when men dominated the profession. She covered every U.S. commander-in-chief since President John F. Kennedy.
 
U.S. President Barack Obama said Saturday that Ms. Thomas opened doors and broke down barriers for generations of female journalists, all while keeping several presidents, including himself, on their toes.
 
She was known to often express strong views on sensitive issues, even when questioning a president during nationally broadcast news conferences. Obama praised her fierce belief that democracy works best when tough questions are asked to hold leaders accountable.
 
In 2010 Thomas was recorded on video saying that Israel should get out of Palestine. She later apologized but ended her White House career after the video led to widespread condemnation.
 
Helen Thomas worked for the United Press International wire service and Hearst newspapers. She ended dozens of presidential news conferences with the familiar phrase "Thank you, Mr. President."
 
White House Correspondents Association President Steve Thomma called Ms. Thomas a trailblazer in journalism. She served as the first woman president of the association from 1975-1976.


Thousands join protests
seeking action on Zimmerman


Thousands of people in the United States have joined nationwide rallies to demand federal action in support of civil rights, one week after a Florida jury acquitted a Hispanic neighborhood watchman in the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager.
 
The National Action Network, led by the American civil rights leader, Rev. Al Sharpton, organized Saturday's vigils in honor of the teenager, Trayvon Martin, outside government buildings in more than 100 cities around the country.
 
They were the latest in a series of national protests against the July 13 acquittal of the former neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who was found not guilty of second degree murder and manslaughter in the February 2012 incident in which he fatally shot Martin in the chest during an altercation. The jury accepted Zimmerman's claim that he was acting in self-defense.
 
The verdict angered many Americans who believe Martin's killing was racially motivated. Race was not discussed in court during the trial.
 
Saturday's main rally was in New York City, where hundreds of people gathered to see Martin's mother Sybrina Fulton, Sharpton and pop superstar couple Beyonce and Jay-Z. Addressing the crowd, Fulton said "today it was my son, tomorrow it might be yours." She also vowed to fight for change in the country to ensure that her son's death is not in vain, saying "I am going to work for your children as well."
 
Ms. Fulton's former husband Tracy Martin also led a rally of hundreds of people in Miami, Florida.
 
Sharpton is pressing the U.S. Department of Justice to launch a civil right prosecution of Zimmerman on suspicion of targeting Martin because of the teenager's race. Some legal experts say it would be difficult for federal prosecutors to prove the allegation.
 
President Barack Obama paid tribute to Martin in a surprise appearance before White House reporters on Friday, saying the teenager "could have been my son ... could have been me 35 years ago."
 
The nation's first black president urged people to see the Martin case from the perspective of African-Americans, saying he and others have experienced society perceiving them as threatening because of their race.
 
Obama also said he is looking into ways to examine state and local laws to see if they encourage confrontations like the one in Florida.


German firm says phones
may have a vulnerability


A United Nations group that advises nations on cybersecurity plans to send out an alert about significant vulnerabilities in mobile phone technology that could potentially enable hackers to remotely attack at least half a billion phones.

The bug, discovered by a German firm, allows hackers to remotely gain control of and also clone certain mobile SIM cards.

Hackers could use compromised SIMs to commit financial crimes or engage in electronic espionage, according to Berlin's Security Research Labs, which will describe the vulnerabilities at the Black Hat hacking conference that opens in Las Vegas July 31.

The U.N.'s Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union, which has reviewed the research, described it as hugely significant.

"These findings show us where we could be heading in terms of cybersecurity risks," Isaid Hamadoun Touré. He is secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union

He said the agency would notify telecommunications regulators and other government agencies in nearly 200 countries about the potential threat and also reach out to hundreds of mobile companies, academics and other industry experts.

A spokeswoman for the GSMA, which represents nearly 800 mobile operators worldwide, said it also reviewed the research.

"We have been able to consider the implications and provide guidance to those network operators and SIM vendors that may be impacted," said GSMA spokeswoman Claire Cranton.

Nicole Smith, a spokeswoman for Gemalto NV, the world's biggest maker of SIM cards, said her company supported GSMA's response.

"Our policy is to refrain from commenting on details relating to our customers' operations," she said.

Cracking SIM cards has long been the holy grail of hackers because the tiny devices are located in phones and allow operators to identify and authenticate subscribers as they use networks.

Karsten Nohl, the chief scientist who led the research team and will reveal the details at Black Hat, said the hacking only works on SIMs that use an old encryption technology known as DES. The technology is still used on at least one out of eight SIMs, or a minimum of 500 million phones, according to Nohl.

The ITU estimates some 6 billion mobile phones are in use worldwide. It plans to work with the industry to identify how to protect vulnerable devices from attack, Touré said.

Once a hacker copies a SIM, it can be used to make calls and send text messages impersonating the owner of the phone, said Nohl, who has a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Virginia.

"We become the SIM card. We can do anything the normal phone users can do," Nohl said in a phone interview. "If you have a MasterCard number or PayPal data on the phone, we get that too."

The mobile industry has spent several decades defining common identification and security standards for SIMs to protect data for mobile payment systems and credit card numbers. SIMs are also capable of running apps.

Nohl said Security Research Labs found mobile operators in many countries whose phones were vulnerable, but declined to identify them. He said mobile phone users in Africa could be among the most vulnerable because banking is widely done via mobile payment systems with credentials stored on SIMs.

All types of phones are vulnerable, including iPhones from Apple Inc, phones that run Google Inc's Android software and BlackBerry Ltd smartphones, he said.

BlackBerry's director of security response and threat analysis, Adrian Stone, said in a statement that his company proposed new SIM card standards last year to protect against the types of attacks described by Nohl, which the GSMA has adopted and advised members to implement.

CTIA, a U.S. mobile industry trade group based in Washington, D.C., said the new research likely posed no immediate threat.

"We understand the vulnerability and are working on it," said CTIA Vice President John Marinho. "This is not what hackers are focused on. This does not seem to be something they are exploiting."
 

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Drive-in movie theaters were once a vibrant part of American culture. The outdoor theaters with huge screens reached their peak in the late 1950s with more than 4,000 of  them across the US.  These days it's tough to find one.  However, some drive-ins still bring in big crowds just like the old days. 

Cars line up at the entrance to the Family Drive-In Theater in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. It's about 130 kilometers from Washington, D.C., where ticket attendant still great visitors cheerfully.

Shannon Scott and her family, like many others, arrived here more than two hours before the scheduled show.

“You get the ambiance, you get the fun concession stand," Scott said. "You get to wait for the dark so there is family time together.”  

Since her family discovered Family Drive-In three years ago, Scott said they have often made the hour and a half drive to enjoy two movies for less than the price of one where she lives.

“It's a beautiful drive," she said. "It is worth it to come here all the time. We love it."

The first drive-in opened in the eastern U.S. state of New Jersey in 1933. By 1958, there were 4,000 in the United States. They began to disappear rapidly in the 1970s and 80s. Today, fewer than 400 are still operating.  

Jim Kopp owns Family Drive-in.

“The drive-ins were built on the edge of towns," he said. "And as the towns were expanded, the price of land started to go higher. The land was more valuable than the business. So a lot of drive-ins lost to the townhouse developments and the retail developments.”

In the early years, drive-ins were a popular date destination. Now they mostly attract families. Kopp's theater even has a playground where children can play before the movies start. 

Fifteen members of Fred Cunliffe's family drove from Texas, North Carolina and other parts of Virginia for a show.

"It is something that we used to do as kids with my parents," he said. "So we decided it will be a really nice family event to come to the drive-in and let the kids get to see everything going on.” 

Some nearby hotels now offer special rates for people who drive in.

"We have had a lot of guests that come from very far and wide to see the drive in theater," said James Revere, from the Holiday Inn Express.

Family Drive-In can fit up to 500 cars on its lot and plays new releases on its two screens. On a good night, Kopp says, he may sell as many as 1,500 tickets.

“Majority of movie ticket sales goes to the studios for a film rental. They take up to 70 percent of the box office takes," said Kopp.

So the theater maintains itself through the sale of food and drink. And there's a new challenge. Drive-ins will have to convert to digital projection by the end of the year, when movie studios stop distributing 35 millimeter films.

“Seventy thousand dollars per projector, so for my theater, it is 140 thousand dollars’ worth of debt that I have to take on to go to digital," Kopp said.

Some drive-ins may not survive. Yet fans hope to enjoy movies under the stars for years to come.


Harvard duo lay groundwork
for a drug cure for cancers


New research conducted by Harvard scientists is laying out a road map to one of the holy grails of modern medicine: a cure for cancer.

As described in a paper recently published in eLife, Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and of biology and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and co-author Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, show that, under certain conditions, using two drugs in a targeted therapy — a treatment approach designed to interrupt cancer’s ability to grow and spread — could effectively cure nearly all cancers.

Though the research is not a cure for cancer, Nowak said it does offer hope to researchers and patients alike.

“In some sense this is like the mathematics that allows us to calculate how to send a rocket to the moon, but it doesn’t tell you how to build a rocket that goes to the moon,” Nowak said. “What we found is that if you have a single point mutation in the genome that can give rise to resistance to both drugs at the same time, the game is over. We need to have combinations such that there is zero overlap between the drugs.”

Importantly, Nowak said, for the two-drug combination to work, both drugs must be given together — an idea that runs counter to the way many clinicians treat cancer today.

“We actually have to work against the status quo somewhat,” he said. “But we can show in our model that if you don’t give the drugs simultaneously, it guarantees treatment failure.”

In earlier studies, Nowak and colleagues showed the importance of using multiple drugs. Though temporarily effective, single-drug targeted therapy will fail, the researchers revealed, because the disease eventually develops resistance to the treatment.

To determine if a two-drug combination would work, Nowak and Bozic turned to an expansive data set supplied by clinicians at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center that showed how patients respond to single-drug therapy. With data in hand, they were able to create computer models of how multidrug treatments would work. Using that model, they then treated a series of “virtual patients” to determine how the disease would react to the multidrug therapy.

“For a single-drug therapy, we know there are between 10 and 100 places in the genome that, if mutated, can give rise to resistance,” Nowak explained. “So the first parameter we use when we make our calculations is that the first drug can be defeated by those possible mutations. The second drug can also be defeated by 10 to 100 mutations.

“If any of those mutations are the same, then it’s a disaster,” he continued. “If there’s even a single mutation that can defeat both drugs, that is usually good enough for the cancer — it will become resistant, and treatment will fail. What this means is we have to develop drugs such that the cancer needs to make two independent steps — if we can do that, we have a good chance to contain it.”

“You would expect to cure most patients with a two-drug combination,” Bozic said. “In patients with a particularly large disease burden you might want to use a three-drug combination, but you would cure most with two drugs.”

The trick now, Nowak and Bozic said, is to develop those drugs.

To avoid developing drugs that are not vulnerable to the same mutation, Bozic said, pharmaceutical companies have explored a number of strategies, including using different drugs to target different pathways in cancer’s development.

“There are pharmaceutical companies here in Cambridge that are working to develop these drugs,” Nowak said. “There may soon be as many as 100 therapies, which means there will be as many as 10,000 possible combinations, so we should have a good repertoire to choose from.

“I think we can be confident that, within 50 years, many cancer deaths will be prevented,” Nowak added. “One hundred years ago, many people died from bacterial infections, and now they would be cured. Today, many people die from cancer, and we can’t help them, but I think once we have these targeted therapies, we will be able to help many people — maybe not everyone — but many people.”


Open access to financial data
being readied for governments


The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has unveiled new plans to tackle tax evasion by improving the way tax authorities share information about individuals and entities like trusts.

Countries are increasingly moving to a standard of sharing information on taxpayers even in the absence of any specific request.

This is more likely to flag up inappropriate behavior than the longer established practice of one tax authority starting an investigation into suspicions of wrongdoing, and then making a request for data.

The European Union has estimated hundreds of billions of euros are lost each year to tax evasion. The stashing of undeclared earnings in accounts in offshore jurisdictions has long been a favored method for hiding cash from one's home tax authority, aided by the veil of secrecy.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which advises its mainly rich nation members on economic and tax policy, issued an updated standard for the automatic exchange of information at the sidelines of a meeting of G20 finance ministers on Saturday.

The organization has proposed a detailed description of the kinds of information that would be exchanged and proposals for common legal and technological standards to facilitate the flow of information.

The organization hopes to have a new draft agreement ready for countries to sign in late 2013.

The shift to an international standard on automatic sharing of information has been accelerated by the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which forces banks outside the United States to give Washington details of foreign accounts held by U.S. citizens.

Countries like Bermuda, often labeled a tax haven by Western lawmakers, said that once they agreed to share information with the United States, other large countries pressured them for a similar deal.