Newspaper cites Snowden
in listing U.S. black budget


Former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has leaked a new top-secret document that for the first time discloses how the United States spends tens of billions of dollars annually on spy programs.
 
The Washington Post Thursday revealed the $52.6 billion black budget set aside for operations in fiscal year 2013.
 
Although the U.S. government annually reveals overall intelligence spending, the 178-page document breaks down how much money goes to which agency and, to a certain extent, what those agencies do with the funds. The newspaper reported that Snowden was the source of the document.
 
According to the Post, the Central Intelligence Agency receives the most funding with a proposed budget of $14.7 billion for 2013.  That is more than 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, Snowden's former employer.
 
Although the newspaper published graphs and charts tracking the spending of each of the intelligence community's 16 agencies, it said it withheld "some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods."
 
The funding pays for an array of spy satellites, high-tech equipment and employees, including analysts, linguists, cryptologists and an increasing number of cyber specialists.
 
Snowden, the source behind the most massive intelligence leak in U.S. history, fled Hawaii three months ago with a trove of secrets. He is now living in temporary asylum in Russia, even as U.S. authorities have sought his extradition to face espionage charges.


Road show for Christian women
brings an encouraging message


The venue looks like a rock concert. But the songs are about Jesus, and the huge crowd in the sports arena is almost exclusively female.
 
The 24-city Believe God Can Do Anything tour is sponsored by the non-denominational group, Women of Faith, which has been staging such inspirational events since 1996.
 
At the Verizon Center sports arena in Washington, D.C., the two-day event combined Christian rock music with a soothing message for American women stressed by the demands of modern-day living.
 
“Do you get that God loves - you?” preacher Sheila Walsh asked the audience as the first musical act wrapped up, “that God is committed to showing up in your life?”
 
Ms. Walsh was born in Scotland and now lives in Texas. She used to co-host the The "700 Club" television show on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
 
She is one of several so-called Bible teachers who take the stage. In an interview, she says she joined Women of Faith because she wants to help women cope. Her message is: “Be yourself.  If that means you’re going to be the best career woman out there, then you go do it. If you want to be the best home-schooling mother, you do that,” said Ms. Walsh.
 
America is in the throes of a debate over how women in the United States should balance work and family.
 
Conservative Christian churches have long taught that women should primarily be mothers and homemakers, but Judith Warner, a fellow at the Center for American Progress and a bestselling author of books on women’s issues, says the recession and the increasing costs of health and child care have rendered that model obsolete.
 
“The divisions that we saw so strongly in the culture wars of 20 years ago,” she says, “where we had stay-at-home moms pitted against working moms, and we had feminists accused of bringing about the ruin of the American family by putting working women to work — that stuff is largely over,” she says.
 
Now, Ms. Warner says, religious and secular women are both struggling.
 
“In some ways, the churches have moved forward with the times more than some of our other institutions,” she said, adding that more than one quarter of children under the age of 5 who are in day care are in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. And while liberal churches are more symbolically in favor of flexible gender roles, conservative churches offer more family-friendly programs, says Ms. Warner.
 
“They’ve really been really active in supporting working families,” she added.
 
At the Women of Faith event, Stella Lee stood in the front row and sang along with the inspirational music.
 
“As a woman, as a mom, as a wife, as a worker, we get so busy and so many times we get completely drained," she said. "When I come here, I look around at all the other women of different races, different ages. I just get encouraged.”
 
During a break, Ms. Walsh, the preacher, rejected the traditional view that a devout woman’s place is solely in the home.
 
“There are so many ways to be fruitful and multiply,” she said. Ms. Walsh said she believes scripture places men and women side by side. She does, however, argue that secular feminism has led women to believe they can have it all, while popular culture is putting unrealistic demands on them.
 
“Our culture says that a woman is judged by how she looks on the outside, by how she dresses and how she presents herself, by her dress size and what her skin looks like and whether her hair is waving in the wind. What we’re telling women is, at the very core of who you are, you are seen and valued by God," she said. "The rest is just window dressing.”


Scientists find a protein
to defeat senior moments


Scientists have good news for all the older adults who occasionally forget why they walked into a room — and panic that they are getting Alzheimer's disease.

Not only is age-related memory loss a syndrome in its own right and completely unrelated to that dread disease, but unlike Alzheimer's it may be reversible or even preventable, researchers led by a Nobel laureate said in a study published Wednesday.

Using human brains that had been donated to science as well as the brains of lab mice, the study for the first time pinpointed the molecular defects that cause cognitive aging.

In an unusual ray of hope for a field that has had almost nothing to offer older adults whose memory is failing, the study's authors conclude that drugs, foods or even behaviors might be identified that affect those molecular mechanisms, helping to restore memory.

Any such interventions would represent a significant advance over the paltry offerings science has come up with so far to prevent memory decline, such as advice to keep cognitively active and healthy — which helps some people, but not all, and has only a flimsy scientific foundation. By identifying the where did I park the car? molecule, the discovery could also kick-start the mostly moribund efforts to develop drugs to slow or roll back the memory lapses that accompany normal aging.

“This is a lovely set of studies,” said Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging, an expert on normal age-related memory decline who was not involved in the new study. “They provide clues to the underlying mechanism of age-related memory decline and will, hopefully, move us down the road toward targeted therapeutics.”

About 40 percent of Americans age 85 and older say they experience some memory loss, a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center found, as did 27 percent of those 75 to 84 and 20 percent of those ages 65 to 74.

The researchers began with eight brains from the New York Brain Bank at Columbia University donated by people aged 33 to 88 who were free of brain disease when they died. They extracted two structures in the hippocampus, a vital cog in the brain's memory machinery: the dentate gyrus, a boomerang-shaped region whose function declines with age but is not affected by Alzheimer's, and the entorhinal cortex, which is largely unaffected by aging but is where Alzheimer's first takes hold, killing neurons.

The scientists then measured which genes had been active in each structure, and found one suspicious difference: 17 genes in the dentate gyrus became more active, or less, as the age of the brain increased.

The most significant change was that the gene for a protein called RbAp48 had essentially retired: The gene's activity tailed off dramatically the older a brain got. As a result, old brains had about half the RbAp48 of young brains, the scientists report online in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The scientists then sampled 10 more healthy human brains, ranging from 41 to 89 years at the time of death. Once again, the amount of RbAp48 protein declined with age in the dentate gyrus. They next confirmed that RbAp48 protein was also less abundant in the dentate gyrus of old mice compared to young ones.

For the final step, the scientists had to nail down whether the missing protein caused age-related memory loss. They genetically engineered mice whose RbAp48 genes were disabled. Result: The young mice had memories as poor as animals four times their age (the mouse equivalent of late middle age), and they had terrible trouble navigating a water maze or differentiating objects they had seen before from novel ones.

Crucially, the scientists also did the reverse experiment, engineering mice so their brains had extra doses of RbAp48. The mice's memories returned to the flower of youth.

“With RbAp48, we were able to reverse age-related memory loss in the mice,” said Columbia's Eric Kandel, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries of the molecular basis of memory and led the research. “Unlike in Alzheimer's, there is no significant cell death in age-related memory loss, which gives us hope it can be prevented or reversed.”

Exactly how RbAp48 does that is not clear. The protein acts as a sort of genetic master key: By causing chromosomes to loosen their hold on the molecular spool they are wound around like thread, it allows genes to be turned on. Among the activated genes, Kandel explained, are those involved in forming memories.

The emerging picture is that levels of RbAp48 decline with age, allowing chromosomes to maintain a death grip on their spools. Memory genes remain dormant.

The researchers plan to see what social and dietary factors might boost RbAp48 in mice, said Kandel, who will be 84 in November. Pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, physical and cognitive exercise are all candidates, said Columbia's  Scott Small, co-senior author of the study.

Testing such interventions in mice should be more useful to humans than tests of drugs for Alzheimer's, he said. RbAp48 is different, Small said. “Alzheimer's does not occur naturally in the mouse. Here, we've caused age-related memory loss in the mouse, and we've shown it to be relevant to human aging.”


Farmers in Colombia march
to protest growing poverty


Thousands of Colombian farmers and state workers marched through Bogota Thursday, banging pots and pans as they converged on the capital after 11 days of increasingly violent protests against agricultural and trade policies they say have left them impoverished.
 
Students wearing balaclavas pelted shop windows with rocks near the capital's main square and clashed with riot police who fired tear gas to disperse them.
 
“Long live the farmers' strike! Food sovereignty,” they chanted, holding up protest banners.
 
President Juan Manuel Santos, who has been unable to end the so-called national strike that has united potato growers, milk producers, teachers and health workers, acknowledged agriculture is in crisis, but called for peaceful dissent while talks about possible solutions are going on.
 
“The farm sector has been abandoned,” the center-right president said in a televised address early Thursday. “The protests are valid ... but, via dialogue, we will resolve the problems ... We are in a storm, but we will persevere.”
 
Protesters wearing typical farmer attire of woolen ponchos, brimmed hats and rubber boots to show their solidarity, marched in 15 columns toward the Plaza Bolivar, where the presidential palace and Congress are located.
 
Farmers have blocked roads, snarling city-bound traffic and pressuring Santos three months before he must decide whether to run for a second term. The government's tough peace negotiations with Marxist rebels are creating their own contentious national debate at the same time.
 
“My purchase power is zero, it's only enough to survive,” said Orlando Pamo, 50, an father of six from central Tolima province who earns less than the minimum wage farming citrus and other fruits. “The government wants us off the land so it can be given to big business. We don't get the benefits companies get.”
 
Santos said he will lift import duties on 23 products, including some fertilizers and pesticides, to help lower crop production costs. He also is working to find more permanent solutions for the farm sector's problems.
 
Clashes between police and protesters over removal of the barricades resulted in at least one death and scores of injuries and arrests since the strike began on Aug. 19.
 
Looting was reported in several towns and blocked roads have prevented food getting to market, raising prices for consumers. Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon has accused the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia rebels of infiltrating the protests and seeking to rope peaceful farmers into their struggle against the government.
 
“Please, let's not fall into the hands of the violent,” said Santos. “Do not allow them to gain strength from these protests because it will distort the entire meaning of the demonstration and it leads to unnecessary confrontations that have led to deaths.”
 
The already grueling life of farming families has become harder in recent years since income from harvests has failed to cover costs of fertilizers and transportation.
 
Potato, corn and milk producers complain that free trade agreements with Europe and the United States have made it  almost impossible to compete with cheaper imports. Droughts followed by unusually heavy rains have also made farming conditions difficult over the past several years.
 
The demonstrations are the second wave of national strikes this year against agricultural and economic policies.
 
“More demonstrations will follow in the coming days if there is no response from the government,” said Julio Roberto Gómez, head of the nation's second biggest union confederation, as protesters banged pots and pans behind him.
 
Even though Santos has made improving the conditions of the poor and cutting the jobless rate a priority, difficulties for farmers are unlikely to change in the coming months.
 
Finance Minister Mauricio Cardenas said it would be impossible to meet all demands from the different protest groups.
 
“The country is on the right track and the economy is an example worldwide,” he said on local radio. “But if you add up everything they want, there's no way to give them it all. They are seeking significant resources. There isn't enough money to cover the demands of all the sectors.”


Drug cartel leader blamed
for 350 murders after arrest


A suspected lieutenant of Mexico's most-wanted drug lord captured this week likely is responsible for at least 350 murders, the government said Thursday.

Mario Nuñez, a/k/a/ “El Mayito” or “M-10,” was believed to be the operations chief of Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman in Chihuahua, a state bordering the United States that has been wracked by drug-related violence during the past few years.

“This person is related to, and believed to be responsible for, the murder of more than 350 people recovered from 23 hidden mass graves,” said government national security spokesman Eduardo Sanchez of Nuñez.

Known in Mexico as El Chapo, Guzman heads the Sinaloa Cartel, which is widely regarded as the country's most powerful drug-running organization.

Chihuahua is home to Ciudad Juárez, a sprawling border metropolis that became notorious in recent years as one of the most violent cities in the world. Police arrested Nuñez, a former policeman in the city, in Ciudad Juárez Tuesday.