Raven-Symoné, the 25 year old singer and actress who played Oliva in The Cosby Show, recently opened up to Vibe Magazine about her dramatic weight loss as well as the fact that it didn’t boost her confidence a bit.

Symoné, who also goes by just Raven, also admitted that the amount of attention and praise that her new slender figure attracts is quite humorous.

“I find it funny that people now come up to me and say, ‘Wow, you are absolutely gorgeous. I’m like, ‘I was beautiful before I lost weight. Egotistically speaking, I thought I was amazing.’”

When talk show host Wendy Williams asked Symone for her figure slimming secret, the former That’s So Raven star replied “less stress.”

“I stopped stressing. You have to realize at 15, there was a whole entire show I had on my shoulders. It was a very big cast and crew and if you’re sick for a day, people lose money and that’s a problem,” she said at the time. “[It wasn't] just over eating because I’ve actually been eating the same. I keep a little bit more smaller portions because I learned that your body has to get rid of that stress some way. Some people break-out, some people lose their hair, some lose weight, some people gain weight, my body just reacted a certain kind of way.”

So now that Symone has lost a reported 35 pounds, can we expect to see her slender new form in the upcoming comedy series, State of Georgia?

According to the actress, no.

“Ironically, my character is supposed to be the size that I was before,” she says. “So I have to wear thicker body pads on the show.”

A magnitude 5.2 earthquake has struck Southern Sumatra, Indonesia at a depth of 20.2 km (12.6 miles), the quake hit at 08:54:16 UTC Wednesday 28th March 2012
The epicenter was 144 km (90 miles) WSW from Bengkulu, Sumatra, Indonesia
No Tsunami Warning Issued - No Reports of Damage or Injuries at this time

Surgeons from the University of Maryland Medical Center have carried out what they said was the world's most comprehensive face transplant - allowing a 37-year-old man to emerge from behind a mask 15 years after a gun accident almost killed him.

Richard Norris of Hillsville, Virginia, was shot in the face in 1997 and lost his nose, lips and most movement in his mouth. Since then, he has had multiple life-saving and reconstructive surgeries but none could repair him to the extent where he felt he could return to society.

He wore a prosthetic nose and a mask even when entering hospital for the transplant. But last week, during a 36-hour operation, University of Maryland doctors gave him a new face from an anonymous donor whose organs saved five other patients' lives on the same day.

Six days after the surgery, he could already move his tongue and open and close his eyes and was recovering much faster than doctors expected.

"He's actually looking in the mirror shaving and brushing his teeth, which we never even expected," said Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, associate professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and head of the transplant team, who spoke at a press conference.

When Mr Norris opened his eyes on the third day after the surgery with his family around him, he wanted to see a mirror.

"He put the mirror down and thanked me and hugged me," Dr Rodriguez said.

The operation follows successful face transplants in Forth Worth, Texas, and Boston, Massachusetts, last year and it seems to be the most aesthetically successful to date, according to photographs and video shared with reporters at a news conference.

Mr Norris, who is still recovering in the hospital and did not appear at the media event, is the first full face transplant recipient in the United States to retain his eyesight.

"We concealed all the lines so it would give him the most immediate best appearance with minimal touch-ups down the road," Dr Rodriguez said later in an interview.

To ensure Mr Norris would retain maximum function of his facial expressions and movements, doctors gave him a new tongue for proper speech, eating, and chewing, normally aligned teeth, and connected his nerves to allow for smiling.

Before the surgery, Mr Norris, who is unmarried and lives with his parents in a rural area, was been unable to find a job because of his appearance, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The transplant was "an amazing feat," said the dean of the School of Medicine, Dr E Albert Reece at the press conference.

"It's also an unprecedented and historic procedure that we believe will change, if you will, the face of medicine now and in the future," Dr Reece said.

About 100 doctors, scientists and other university medical staff ranging from plastic surgeons to craniofacial specialists teamed up for the operation.

The surgery involved 10 years of research funded by the Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research and will serve as a model for helping war veterans injured by improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan, the university said.

Dr Rodriguez saluted the work of the teams around the world that had conducted the 22 face transplants to date, without which, he said, this operation would not have been possible.

A faint, infrared glow above the winter poles of Mars is giving new insights into seasonal changes in the planet's atmospheric circulation. The tell-tale night emission was first detected in 2004 in observations made by the OMEGA imaging spectrometer on ESA's Mars Express orbiter.

Writing in a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, a team of French scientists reported on the first detection of an infrared emission above the polar regions of Mars. The emission, at a wavelength of 1.27 microns, was detected on three occasions (in 2004, 2005 and 2006) during a series of 40 observations made by OMEGA above the planet's limb.

Infrared emissions are not unusual in planetary atmospheres. In the upper atmospheres of both Venus and Mars, carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2) molecules are split or photodissociated by solar ultraviolet (UV) light. This produces oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the region known as the thermosphere, at an altitude of about 80-90 km above each planet's dayside. Read More

A worldwide network of hackers has managed to gain access to the most secure networks on the Internet. The leaderless and faceless group, known as Anonymous, has infiltrated networks of the CIA, Interpol, email accounts of presidents, and has taken down the major web properties of global corporations. During its near-eight years of existence, Anonymous hackers have exposed a huge network of neo-Nazis in Germany and a stealth online child pornography ring.

No one knows how wide the Anonymous hackers’ network stretches across continents, nor how many people belong to the Internet-based group. All activity takes place on mostly secure networks and on social media. Anyone can carry the banner of Anonymous.

The rise of social media has proliferated the threat of attacks from people who claim to be a part of the elusive group. Though many times these highly publicized threats are not carried out, they nevertheless garner significant publicity. Read More

Mariano Rajoy expected to win Andalucia regional elections, then order further austerity measures.

Spain's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, faces the toughest week of his three months in office as he is forced to announce up to €40bn (£33.45bn) in spending cuts and taxes in a budget on 30 March, the day after a general strike.

As Rajoy's conservative People's party looked set for victory in key regional elections in southern Andalucia on Sunday, other European leaders and the markets were signalling Spain as now being the biggest single threat to the stability of the eurozone.

A win in Andalucia would give Rajoy unprecedented control over troublesome regional governments whose inability to reduce deficits has helped to put Spain centre-stage in the eurozone crisis. Asturias, a much smaller northern region, was also voting. Read More

Your editor's fingers are a little rusty after a full week away from the keyboard. But our hands were not idle! We rediscovered the pleasure of discovering information the old fashioned way last week, analogue style! More on the benefits to your brain of reading books in a moment.

But first, this whole "Asian Century" thing is getting quite complicated, isn't it? We took a week off following the "After America" conference to ponder what it all meant. Is America done for? Can China liberalise its currency without destroying its banking system? And will former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry include a copy of our DVD in his forthcoming report, "Australia in the Asian Century"?

To be honest, the fact the Australian government has commissioned a white paper on the whole subject makes us nervous. Nothing says "stale and uninteresting idea" like a government white paper. In fact, it leads us to one of the ideas voiced at our conference that there won't be an Asian century at all. The whole premise might be flawed. Read More

Today legendary trader and investor Jim Sinclair told King World News that gold has taken a major step towards becoming the currency of choice when it comes to international trade.

Sinclair also said the US has launched an economic war against key Asian countries and it is having an immediate impact on the gold market. Here is what Sinclair had to say about the situation: “Wall Street goes to war and the weapon is money. There was a day when we went to war and the weapon was an armada of ships. It was landing on Iwo Jima, mano y mano, it was bravery and honor. Today it’s dollars.”

Jim Sinclair continues:

“We go to war, challenging the other side to do the same because whatever you use as a weapon, the other side is going to tend to use as a weapon. The weapon that’s being used is the interbank transfer system, the way money is sent from bank to bank.

We’ve already seen that Iran has been basically shut out of the SWIFT system and the SWIFT system is what this is all about. The SWIFT system doesn’t take any money for the money that goes through it. The SWIFT system is like the old telephone company. What it does is charge for the use of its communication. Read More

Moscow: Meteor-1, the Soviet Union’s first fully operational weather satellite, will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere after more than four decades in orbit, the web site of the US Strategic Command said.

The Meteor satellite series was developed in the Soviet Union during the sixties. On March 26, 1969, a Vostok rocket launched Meteor-1, the very first version of the Soviet Meteor satellite network, into orbit. The satellite terminated operations in July 1970, according to NASA information.

The spacecraft is expected to begin falling at 3:13 a.m. Moscow time on 27 March with debris estimated to fall into the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka, the US Strategic Command said. Read More

New Delhi: The country’s new energy companies were being “crushed” due to the dramatic slashing of prices of solar equipment by Chinese industry and the government will have to adopt regulatory measures to safeguard Indian interests, Union Minister Farooq Abdullah said in New Delhi today.

Addressing a meeting on new energy, the Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy said, “The price of these panels has come down basically from China. Our own industry is suffering because these Chinese are bringing the prices of their panels down so dramatically to crush our industry.”

Abdullah admitted that the slashing of prices has helped in bringing down the cost of one unit of solar power from Rs 18 to Rs 7 in recent times but the country will have to safeguard its interests to help the local producers. Read More

Every quarter the Office of the Currency Comptroller releases its report on Bank Derivative Activities, and every quarter we find that the Too Big To Fail get Too Bigger To Fail. To wit: in Q4 2011, of the total $230.8 trillion in US outstanding derivatives, the Top 5 banks (JPM, BofA, Morgan Stanley, Goldman and HSBC) accounted for 95.7% of all Derivatives.

In some respects this is good news: in Q2, the Top 5 banks held 95.9% of the $250 trillion in derivatives. Unfortunately it is also bad news, because $220 trillion is more than enough for the world to collapse in a daisy chained failure of bilateral netting (which not even all the central banks in the world can offset).

What is the worst news, is that the just released report indicates that in addition to everything else, we have now hit peak delusion, as banks now report to the OCC that a record high 92.2% of gross credit exposure is "bilaterally netted." Read More

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — The company that makes "pink slime" suspended operations Monday at three of four plants where the beef ingredient is made, saying officials would work to address recent public concern about the product.

Beef Products Inc. will suspend operations at plants in Amarillo, Texas; Garden City, Kan.; and Waterloo, Iowa, according to Craig Letch, the company's director of food safety and quality assurance. The company's plant at its Dakota Dunes, S.D., headquarters will continue operations.

"We feel like when people can start to understand the truth and reality then our business will come back," Letch said. "It's 100 percent beef."

Federal regulators say the ammonia-treated filler, known in the industry as "lean, finely textured beef," meets food safety standards. But critics say the product could be unsafe and is an unappetizing example of industrialized food production. Read More

WASHINGTON — US trade authorities on Thursday announced an investigation into yet another Chinese export product, this time the veritable kitchen sink.

The US Commerce Department said it is examining whether China is selling steel sinks below fair value and if Chinese sink manufacturers are getting unfair subsidies.

Trade disputes between China and the United States are legion. The two economic powers have already sparred over the import and export of solar panels to tires to chickens.

Now that list includes "imports of drawn stainless steel sinks" -- or kitchen sinks.

The business -- while a fraction of the US-China's half a trillion dollar a year trade -- is not something to let slip down the drain. Read More

What is the place of the Federal Reserve System in the American financial and economic structure?

Prior to the Federal Reserve’s founding in 1913, U.S. monetary policy was conducted by the Treasury. Like the Fed, it had district sub-treasuries that performed nearly all the financial functions that the Fed later took over: providing credit to move the crops in autumn, managing government debt, and so forth.

But after the severe 1907 financial crisis, a National Monetary Commission was reformed. Under the then-Republican administration, it recognized a need for more active government intervention to prevent future financial crises. It also recognized the desirability of moving away from the Anglo-Dutch-American system of “merchant banking” based on short-term lending against collateral in place, or for shipping of goods already produced. The National Monetary Commission’s longest volumes were on the great German industrial banks, and Republican policy aimed at bringing banking into the industrial era, to provide long-term funding after the model of German and other Central European banks.

However, the leading bankers sought to use the crisis as an opportunity to grab power for Wall Street, away from the Treasury. In this sense, the Fed was founded in large part to take monetary control away from Washington’s elected officials and appointees, and privatize the supply of money and credit.

So its place in the U.S. financial and economic structure is to allocate credit, primarily to serve Wall Street financial interests. That explains the insistence on the financial class here and abroad in insisting on an “independent” central bank. It means that instead of serving the public interest, it serves the interests of the banking class. The hoped-for transformation of commercial banking into long-term industrial banking was not achieved. Read More

A deep rift between Egypt's ruling military leaders and the radical Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates the post-Mubarak era Parliament, indicates that the country is headed toward a state of political crisis, presidential hopeful Amr Moussa has said.

Reacting to reports of a tussle
between the military and Muslim brotherhood over the sacking of the cabinet, Moussa said that he fears political instability if cabinet is dissolved now.

The Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, has been pressuring the military to sack the cabinet and appoint an FJP-led government after it won a crushing victory in parliamentary elections. Read More

* Japan veers from nuclear summit agenda to criticise rocket plan

* Obama warns against complacency in fighting nuclear terrorism

* Summit statement light on substantial goals

* Japan's Noda spells out lessons learnt from Fukushima

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Jack Kim

SEOUL, March 27 (Reuters) - Japan steered off the agenda at a nuclear security summit on Tuesday to hit out at North Korea's plans for a rocket launch next month, as U.S. President Barack Obama cautioned against complacency in dealing with the threat of nuclear terrorism.

The summit was briefly interrupted by a dispute between Argentina and Britain, which went to war in 1982 over the Falkland Islands, over suggestions Britain had sent a submarine capable of carrying nuclear weapons to the South Atlantic.

A communique issued at the end of the two-day meeting of more than 50 world leaders in Seoul was light on specifics on how to reduce the risk of atomic materials falling into bad hands, loosely calling for all vulnerable material to be secured in four years. Read More

A JetBlue captain who ranted about Iraq and Afghanistan and claimed that a bomb was on a Las Vegas-bound flight was locked out of the cockpit, tackled and restrained by passengers, people aboard the plane said.

The captain of Flight 191 from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport had a "medical situation" and the co-pilot diverted the plane to land in Amarillo, Texas, around 10 a.m. Tuesday, JetBlue Airways said in a statement.

Josh Redick, a passenger sitting near the middle of the plane, said the pilot "stormed out" of the cockpit.

Tony Antolino, a 40-year-old executive for a security firm, said the captain walked to the back of the plane and seemed disoriented and agitated. Then he began yelling about an unspecified threat linked to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They're going to take us down, they're taking us down, they're going to take us down. Say the Lord's Prayer, say the Lord's Prayer," the captain screamed, according to Antolino.

"He was irate," Redick said. "He was spouting off about Afghanistan and souls and al-Qaeda."

Gabriel Schonzeit, who was sitting in the third row, said the captain said there could be a bomb on board the flight.

"He started screaming about al-Qaeda and possibly a bomb on the plane and Iraq and Iran and about how we were all going down," Schonzeit told the Amarillo Globe-News.

'He was spouting off about Afghanistan and souls and al-Qaeda.'—Josh Redick, passenger on Flight 191

The captain had been exhibiting "erratic behaviour," so the co-pilot locked him out of the cockpit, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement.

Antolino, who was in the 10th row, said he and three others tackled the captain as he ran for the cockpit door, pinned him and held him down while the plane landed at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.

"That's how we landed," he said. "There were four of us on top of him.… Everybody else kind of took a seat and that's how we landed."

An off-duty captain who just happened to be a passenger on the flight went to the flight deck and took over the duties of the ill captain "once on the ground," the airline said in a statement. It didn't elaborate.

'It was a team effort'

Paul Babakitis, a retired New York Police Department sergeant, was among the group of passengers who helped to subdue the captain, who he described as weighing about 250 pounds and "solid as a rock" at a height of about 6-4".

"I'm not foreign to situations like this, but I don't expect them at 30,000 feet," Babakitis told CNN Tuesday night.

"It was a team effort, it truly was. When we took him down, he was screaming about, 'Say your prayers, say your prayers.' … We isolated him, we contained him, we prevented other passengers from getting injured."

Babakitis and Antolino both credited the flight's co-pilot with helping to coax the "incoherent" JetBlue captain out of the cockpit.

"The co-pilot of the flight, he really, I think, is the hero here," Antolino said. "Because he had the sense to recognize that something was going horribly wrong."

Shane Helton, 39, of Quinlan, Okla., said he saw emergency and security personnel coming on and off the plane as it sat on the tarmac at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.

Passengers interviewed

"They pulled one guy out on a stretcher and put him in an ambulance," said Helton, who went to the airport with his fiancée to see one of her sons off as he joined the navy.

Helton said the ambulance then sat on the tarmac next to the plane for more than 30 minutes.

JetBlue said the ill captain was taken to a medical facility in Amarillo.

Once on the ground and off the plane, authorities interviewed each of the passengers, according to 22-year-old passenger Grant Heppes, of New York City.

The FBI was co-ordinating an investigation with the airport police, Amarillo police, the FAA and the Transportation Safety Administration, according to agency spokeswoman Lydia Maese in Dallas.

She declined to comment on whether any arrests have been made.

As a result of the incident, the FAA will review the captain's medical certificate — essentially a seal of approval that the pilot is healthy. All pilots working for scheduled airlines must have a first-class medical certificate. The certificates are required to be renewed every year if the pilot is under 40, and every six months if they are aged 40 or over.

To obtain a certificate, the pilot must receive a physical examination by an FAA-designated medical examiner that includes questions about the pilot's psychological condition. The medical examiner can order additional psychological testing.

Pilots are required to disclose all existing physical and psychological conditions and medications.

In 2008, an Air Canada co-pilot had a mental breakdown on a flight from Toronto to London and was forcibly removed from the cockpit, restrained and sedated. A flight attendant with flying experience helped the pilot safely make an emergency landing in Ireland. None of the 146 passengers and nine crew members on board were injured.

source : bbcnews