Scientists hope that a powerful new anti-cancer drugs based on green tea could soon be developed after they found that an extract from the beverage could make almost half of tumours vanish. The University of Strathclyde team made 40 per cent of human skin cancer tumours disappear using the compound, called epigallocatechin gallate, in a laboratory study.?
Green tea has long been suspected of having anti-cancer properties and the extract has been investigated before. However, this is the first time researchers have managed to make it effective at shrinking tumours.?
Previous attempts to capitalise on its cancer-fighting properties have failed because scientists used intravenous drips, which failed to deliver enough of the extract to the tumours themselves. So, the Strathclyde team devised a ?targeted delivery system?.?
The lab test on one type of human skin cancer showed 40 per cent of tumours disappeared after a month of treatment, while an additional 30 per cent shrank. ?This research could open doors to new treatments one of the biggest killer diseases,? said Dr Christine Dufes, a senior lecturer at the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, who led the research.?
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Earlier this year, we fell in love with the Nikon D800. How could you not? It's a 36.6-megapixel hulk of a professional camera. But if you don't have $3000 lying around, too bad. More »
FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii (AP) ? The leader of U.S. Army forces in Asia and the Pacific says his soldiers will be able to conduct more exercises with other nations in the region, as the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan and the military refocuses its attention.
Lt. Gen. Francis J. Wiercinski, the commander of U.S. Army Pacific, said he'd like U.S. soldiers to undertake more exercises with counterparts from nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
The Army will also be able to have more active duty soldiers, instead of reserves, participate in exercises with allies such as Japan.
"We've been engaged, obviously, in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that's where we've had to focus ? for all the right reasons," Wiercinski told The Associated Press in an interview at his headquarters in Hawaii. "But now that we're having this opportunity, we can get back into the Pacific with our partners here."
The Army has 70,000 soldiers and 12,000 civilians at installations in the Asia-Pacific region.
U.S. military leaders and diplomats have increasingly emphasized the importance of Asia and the Pacific as the region's economies grow and gain clout.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stressed last week that the U.S. pivot to the Pacific isn't aimed at containing or threatening China, which now has the world's second-largest economy after the U.S. But Washington has criticized China for lacking transparency while it has rapidly modernized its military and boosted military spending.
The Pentagon in January issued a new national defense strategy declaring that the U.S. would "rebalance" toward the region, noting U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the area.
Examples of the strategy are slowly emerging.
Last year, the U.S. and Australia announced an agreement for up to 2,500 U.S. Marines to rotate through a joint military training hub in the northern Australia city of Darwin. The Navy next year plans to begin deploying a littoral combat ship ? a new type of vessel that can operate closer to shore than other ships ? to Singapore.
The Air Force, meanwhile, plans to make greater use of airfields and bombing ranges in the Australian Outback.
Wiercinski said the Army doesn't want to set up new bases. Instead, he spoke of soldiers training with other nations to get a feel for cultures, terrain and interaction with U.S. allies.
"We're not talking about putting bases in other countries or a permanent presence anywhere," he said. "We're talking about rotating ? 30, 40 days at a pop."
Wiercinski pointed to the current deployment of a few dozen soldiers to Tonga for a disaster relief exercise as the type of drill likely to become more prevalent.
In the drill, which also involves Australia, France and New Zealand, Tonga calls the U.S. for help after being hit by a major earthquake and tsunami. The Army sends soldiers to the Pacific island nation within 24 hours to assess the situation and report what help Tonga needs.
"Just that, the ability to do that, demonstrates our capability, shows the Tongan government and all the neighbors in the area that we're backing up what we say we can do," Wiercinski said.
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immediately and then every day for 30 days. Those who received the statin were encouraged to continue taking medications when they returned home.
After one year, 10 of 78 people (about 13 %) who took the statin had died or suffered a major coronary problem, such as heart attack or recurrent angina, compared to just under 27 % (21 of 78 ) of those who didn t receive the drug, the researchers reported.
The observation is not new, he says, for a number of other studies have demonstrated the benefits of the use of statins in the immediate episodes of acute coronary syndrome.
Only about 18 % of those who received statins had problems requiring hospitalization during follow-up, compared with nearly 44 % of those not taking the drug.
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Precious Metals Brokerage Group, International (PMBG) Discloses How Self-directed IRAs can Be Used To Invest In Gold ...
Asset diversification is the key to financial success according to financial professionals across the globe. They suggest that purchasing precious metals to diversify investments among different securities or asset classes can greatly reduce the risks of investing. While gold mutual funds, gold ETFs, and gold mining stocks are also good options to consider, a self-directed IRA enables investors ...
10 overlooked retirement tips
There's more to retirement planning than the often-heard strategies. These guidelines are less well-known but no less valuable.
Keep Track Of Your Asset Allocations
As you get closer to reaching your goals, your time horizon changes and that in turn should trigger a change in your asset allocation.
Opinion: Why the U.S. Needs to Invest in Building and Unlocking Immigrant Skills
In the clamor to increase American competitiveness, U.S. immigration policy has emerged as a potential tool favored by many business and political leaders. Recent proposals would retain temporary high-skilled workers as permanent residents, entice foreign entrepreneurs to start and build businesses here, or help international students in high-demand fields gain a residency foothold.
Allianz Life Launches New Variable Annuity Through Wells Fargo Advisors' Asset Advisor Program
Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America , announced that the Allianz Retirement AdvantageSM Variable Annuity is now available within Wells Fargo Advisors? Asset Advisor Program.
How Much Did You Save for Your Retirement?
Saving aggressively for retirement gets easier over time, write many retired and soon-to-retire Morningstar.com readers.
Pension fund for N.H. employees to invest 20 overseas
New Hampshire Retirement System, Concord, will reduce fixed income and increase alternatives under a new target asset allocation approved Tuesday, confirmed Marty Karlon, spokesman for the 5.8 billion pension fund.
Is Your Retirement Portfolio's Asset Allocation on Track?
The essential first step for retirement portfolio planning: finding the right stock/bond mix.
Oh, man. We were already aware that Egg Romney simply does not care for backtalk from The Help, and that Miffed Romney may not be great under pressure (or ever?). And Miffed Romney hasn?t had a good day we can remember since his Mr. Bean-level disastrous trip to Europe, which spawned the eternal, ...
Now that the White House says a 'terrorist attack' struck the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, questions could arise about President Obama's Middle East policy in the wake of the Arab Spring.
By Howard LaFranchi,?Staff writer / September 21, 2012
After a week of hesitation, the White House now says it is ?self-evident? that a ?terrorist attack,? and not just a spontaneous reaction from a furious mob, struck the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last week.
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The characterization is important, because it opens the door to the conclusion that the attack was a preplanned assault, resulting in the deaths of four US diplomats, including the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.
The repercussions of declaring that the Benghazi attack was a planned terrorist assault on the United States would be extensive. For starters, it would raise questions about the Obama administration?s precautions in a volatile region and its preparedness for anti-US strikes in an area known to harbor Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist elements.
More broadly, it could call into question President Obama?s Middle East policy in the wake of the Arab awakening. Some Republican critics are already tarring the policy as too weak and dismissive of the threats that the region?s tumult presents.
Far from clarifying the situation, the White House characterization of the Benghazi attack as self-evidently a terrorist attack only muddies the waters further, some foreign-policy experts say.
?I heard that phrase, and I thought, what do they mean? Are they using ?self-evident? as kind of a throwaway phrase to say, ?Well, this was a situation where violence was used with intent against a US facility?? Or are they saying, ?We?ve got evidence that this was a preplanned event??? says Wayne White, a former State Department official with experience in intelligence gathering in the Middle East. ?It?s just not clear what this statement really says.?
On Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, ?It is self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack,? adding, ?Our embassy was attacked violently, and the result was four deaths of American officials.?
Later at a question-and-answer session in Miami organized by the Spanish-language TV network Univision, Mr. Obama emphasized that while many details are still unclear, it appeared that extremists had used protests resulting from outrage over an anti-Muslim video as an ?excuse? to attack US interests.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks opened higher on Friday as Spain moved toward reform measures in anticipation of a bailout package and as Apple debuted its latest iPhone worldwide, sending its shares up to a new peak.
Spain is considering freezing pensions and speeding up a planned rise in the retirement age as it races to cut spending and meet conditions of an expected international sovereign aid package, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The country's deputy prime minister later denied the government was mulling the freezing of pensions.
"The problems are very big (in Spain and Europe in general), it's possible this is the beginning of the workout of the situation, it certainly takes some pressure off," said Rick Meckler, president LibertyView Capital Management in New York.
"But you can expect - as it's gone on all year - there will be positive and negative news stories out of Europe until Germany makes some firm decision on its level of commitment."
After gaining about 6 percent since the start of August on expectations for new economic stimulus measures by world central banks, the S&P 500 <.spx> has seen muted action this week, barely moving 0.4 percent in either direction daily.
There may be increased volatility towards the close Friday due to 'quadruple witching' - the quarterly settlement and expiration of four different types of September e q uity futures and options contracts. Expiration can lead to greater volume and volatility as players adjust or exercise their derivative positions.
"That has historically been a positive day for the market so you have some people just really looking at that," said Meckler, referring to the quadruple witching.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 21.37 points, or 0.16 percent, to 13,618.30. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> added 4.63 points, or 0.32 percent, to 1,464.89. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> rose 14.89 points, or 0.47 percent, to 3,190.85.
Apple Inc climbed 0.6 percent to $703.11, after earlier hitting an all-time high of $704.33. The company's iPhone 5 hit stores around the world, giving the consumer giant a boost ahead of the crucial end-of-year holiday season, even as rival Samsung Electronics Co steps up its legal challenge over key technologies.
Oracle Corp gained 2 percent to $32.89 after the software maker's first-quarter met Wall Street expectations, and though the company hardware sales are expected to drop further after tumbling 24 percent from a year ago.
Michael Kors Holdings Ltd climbed 5.6 percent to $55.43 after the company said it will likely earn more than it earlier expected in the second quarter as the fashion and accessory designer banks on strong global sales.
Darden Restaurants Inc posted first-quarter earnings that beat analysts' estimates, and the company stood by its sales and profit forecast for the year. Shares rose 4.5 percent to $57.17.
Vivus Inc plunged 11.3 percent to $21.03 after the company said it expects a European committee to recommend against the approval of its obesity drug Qsiva, based on preliminary feedback from the committee.
KIEV (Reuters) - Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski warned Ukraine on Thursday that its European integration depended on the transparency of October's parliamentary election and the fate of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has called European integration his top foreign policy priority, but Kiev's ties with the European Union have soured since he came to power in February 2010.
"Poland has consistently and constantly expressed the position that carrying out fair elections in Ukraine, regardless of their outcome, should open way for further steps with the goal of signing and ratifying the association agreement between the EU and Ukraine," Komorowski told reporters after meeting Yanukovich on a visit to Ukraine.
"The stakes are high both for Ukraine and Europe, a lot can be gained or everything can be lost."
The EU shelved landmark deals on free trade and political association with Ukraine after a local court sentenced Tymoshenko, 51, a former prime minister and Yanukovich's main political opponent, to seven years in prison last October.
Brussels called her conviction on abuse-of-office charges an example of selective justice and urged her release. It has also criticized the slow pace of reforms in Ukraine and expressed concerns about the fairness of the election given Tymoshenko's inability to run.
Yanukovich said last week he expected work on the association agreement to resume after the October 28 vote, only to be rebuked by European officials who reminded him about Tymoshenko, a position Komorowski reiterated.
"The case of Yulia Tymoshenko is Ukraine's internal affair but at the same time it is a serious and significant obstacle on the path of Ukraine getting closer to the EU," he said.
TIGHT-LIPPED
Yanukovich declined to say whether he would pardon Tymoshenko, who is now fighting tax evasion and embezzlement charges in a fresh trial.
A leader of the 2004 "Orange Revolution" protests which derailed Yanukovich's first bid for presidency, Tymoshenko has accused him of extracting revenge and trying to weaken the opposition ahead of the October election.
The United States this month criticized what it called biased media coverage and uneven representation of political parties in electoral commissions, saying the vote could be judged as "failed".
Political analysts expect the election will see Yanukovich's allies continue to control parliament.
Tymoshenko, who has been receiving treatment for back trouble in a state-run hospital since May, is challenging her initial abuse-of-office conviction in the European Court of Human Rights and has denied any wrongdoing.
Famous for her sharp tongue and trademark peasant hair braid, Tymoshenko served twice as prime minister but lost the 2010 presidential vote to Yanukovich in a close run-off.
Soon afterwards, she was slapped with the abuse of office charge related to a 2009 gas deal with Russia which she had negotiated as prime minister. According to Yanukovich's government, the deal had saddled Ukraine with an exorbitant price for vital energy supplies.
(Writing by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Sophie Hares)
ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2012) ? If you open any biology textbook to the section on proteins, you will learn that a protein is made up of a sequence of amino acids, that the sequence determines how the chain of amino acids folds into a compact structure, and that the folded protein's structure determines its function. In other words sequence encodes structure and function derives from structure.
But the textbooks may have to be rewritten. As Rohit Pappu and two colleagues explain in a perspective published Sept. 20 in Science, a large class of proteins doesn't adhere to the structure-function paradigm. Called intrinsically disordered proteins, these proteins fail fold either in whole or in part and yet they are functional.
The following is a recent interview with Pappu, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Center for Biological Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, who explains the latest science.
When did people realize some proteins violate the rules?
It's been about 20 years. The earliest clue was that some protein segments didn't show up in X-ray crystallography or NMR studies, the standard ways of studying protein structure.
By the 1990s people who studied how proteins interact with DNA had noticed the proteins often change shape when they interact with DNA. In the absence of DNA all the standard probes for protein structure reported back that the proteins were floppy, and yet when the protein formed a complex with DNA it had a well-defined three-dimensional structure.
How did you first come to hear about them?
By serendipity. When I was leaving Johns Hopkins University to come to Washington University in 2001 I had a meeting with Keith Dunker of the Indiana University Schools of Medicine and Informatics, one of the founding fathers of this field. It was pure chance. The meeting started awkwardly because Keith was wondering who I was and I had never heard of him. I was working on a polymer physics description of unfolded proteins, and it turned out he had just written an 80-page review paper on intrinsically disordered proteins.
"Every time you talk to people in the back alleys of protein science," he said, "they tell you their proteins are very flexible or highly dynamic, and this dynamism is important for function."
So Keith did two things. He synthesized all of the information then known about these flexible, highly disordered proteins. And, together with his colleague Vladimir Uversky, he asked if it was possible to predict which sequences would be incapable of folding autonomously. With the help of computer scientists who taught him how to look for patterns in high-dimensional spaces, he learned that 11 out of the 20 amino acids predispose sequences toward being disordered. Today there are about 20 predictors of disorder.
So when I heard this story I thought, "OK, either this is absolutely crackers or it is going to be transformative. I'm going to take a bet on transformative because I find what he's saying compelling."
So during my first two years at Washington University I started to devour the literature. I think I scared a lot of people here who weren't sure they had hired the person they thought they were hiring.
What percentage of proteins are intrinsically disordered?
It goes by kingdoms. So in bacteria and prokaryotic organisms these numbers are pretty small. They're about 5 percent of the proteome, the entire set of proteins made by an organism. But if you go to eukaryotes or multicellular organisms then the numbers get to 30 or 40 percent of the entire proteome.
But if you ask what percentage of sequences that make up the signaling proteome -- proteins that are busy passing messages to other proteins -- are intrinsically disordered, then the numbers jump up to 60 to 70 percent.
There seems to be a division of responsibilities. Structured proteins take part in catalysis and transport. Intrinsically disordered proteins are important for signaling and regulation.
Why are disordered proteins involved in signaling and regulation?
I think there are two logical reasons. One is that complexes involving intrinsically disordered proteins are short-lived and the other is that they typically bind many rather than just one molecule.
If a molecule cannot fold except in the context of a complex, then some of the energy used for folding must come from intermolecular interactions. And if the molecule has taken out an energy loan, the complex that forms is not going to be very stable or long-lived.
You're combining high specificity (because the protein will only fold when it recognizes the molecule with which it forms a complex) with low overall affinity (because the complex is not very stable).
The many-to-one interactions arise because disordered proteins typically function through short amino acid stretches instead of large protein-protein interfaces. So a single polypeptide stretch can interact with multiple targets. One motif talks to one protein, and a second motif talks to another protein, but through the chain they can communicate with each other.
That's why these molecules happen to be at hubs within networks. They're trafficking information through networks like the air traffic control tower in an airport hub. Because most of their functions are carried out by these very short motifs, they are capable of coordinating large amounts of information that are disparate in nature. You get many things happening at the same time.
What was remarkable to me about your perspective is that you emphasized functionality of these proteins. Isn't the name a bit misleading?
You're right. As we get to know them better we've thought we should have called disordered proteins, molecular rheostats. But to a physicist disorder just means thermal fluctuations are dominant, so for physicists it's an accurate description. The problem is that in the biomedical field the word disorder has been coopted for disease.
You mention several tricks these proteins have up their sleeves. One I thought was clever was modulating the local chemical environment to encourage a particular reaction.
This is a very important idea. If you're doing chemistry in a test tube, and you want to make a reaction go, you increase the concentration of the reactants: A needs to bump into B and do so often. But this is a matter of probability so you might need a gazillion molecules of A and bazillion of B to get some statistics.
But if there's a tether between A and B, they're guaranteed to bump into each other quite often. You might be able to get away with a handful of molecules instead of gazillion.
The loose tether, in effect, increases the concentration of A around B, and the tether is often a disordered region.
Another thing you mentioned was cryptic disorder: the idea that structured proteins can become disordered. That's such a backward flip.
Richard Kriwacki of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a co-author of this perspective, is the person who made the clearest discovery in that regard. He shows that two structured domains can come together -- this is part of the whole p53 tumor suppressor apparatus -- and in trying to commingle, they undergo an unfolding transition that exposes sites that otherwise were buried.
This is the idea of cryptic disorder: that domains, by promoting disorder in one another, reveal hidden, or cryptic, motifs or sites that now are available for function.
You mention that in the biomedical community disorder is associated with disease. Your co-author M. Madan Babu of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge has written about this connection.
Yes. Cells make many decisions. They decide to differentiate, to die, to regenerate, or to go quiet ,and these decisions are controlled by regulatory networks. The integrators in the networks are predominantly disordered regions.
So the question is: Will mutations in those regions give rise to unwarranted cellular phenotypes and hence diseases, such as cardiovascular disorders, cancer and neurodegeneration? The answer is absolutely yes.
But what we are learning is that mutations in disordered regions don't necessarily generate a deleterious phenotype because disordered regions are fairly unconstrained compared to structured regions. So these regions are also engines of robustness.
They're more robust to mutation?
At least the one study that looked at cancer mutation would suggest that. It showed that cancer-associated mutations partition toward structured regions of proteins, not toward disordered regions.
Do you think the new awareness of disordered proteins will lead to medical breakthroughs?
Maybe. If I tell you that a disordered protein is at the hub of a network, then it stands to reason that targeting the hub with a drug gives you a ready-made way of controlling a cellular decision.
The only problem is that we don't quite know what it means to target a hub. If a protein has a very precise shape we know how to target it: it's like designing a key for a lock. But if a protein is disordered we have to understand what that means for that particular hub. We also have to be aware that anything that changes the hub will change a range of downstream processes, pathways and cellular decisions.
Nonetheless many people now are talking about these disordered proteins as druggable targets.
Together with Peter Tompa, another of the field's founders, you organized a Gordon Research Conference on disordered proteins this summer. This was a chance for the leading scientists in the field to explore their thoughts off the record. What was the consensus?
It was evident that the more you know the harder it is to draw the order/disorder demarcation. There is a continuum. In fact, many disordered regions do end up adopting structure; they just defer the adoption of structure to the appropriate context.
We wrote the Science perspective because we thought this was the opportune moment to make the point that there is probably evolutionary synergy between the structured domains and the disordered regions, and that synergy is what we really need to wrap our heads around if we are really going to get at how biology integrates signals to control processes and generate responses.
So at the end of the day what you end up with is molecular integrators and it appears that these disordered regions are the molecular integrators.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Washington University in St. Louis. The original article was written by Diana Lutz.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
M. Madan Babu, Richard W. Kriwacki, and Rohit V. Pappu. Versatility from Protein Disorder. Science, 2012; 337 (6101): 1460-1461 DOI: 10.1126/science.1228775
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
MARIKANA, South Africa (Reuters) - Thousands reported for work at Lonmin's Marikana mine on Thursday, ending a strike in which 46 people died, but at rival Amplats miners barricaded a street with burning tires and the firm said it had been badly hit by a walkout to demand higher pay.
A police helicopter hovered above a shanty town near Amplats mines at Rustenburg, 100 km (70 miles) northwest of Johannesburg, and armed officers backed by armored vehicles and water cannon were on stand-by.
There were no reports of clashes but Anglo American Platinum, or Amplats, the world's top producer of the precious metal, reported only one in five of its workers had turned up at its Rustenberg mines.
It was clear the wave of wildcat strikes in the sector had not ended with the signing this week of a pay deal at smaller platinum producer Lonmin.
The unrest, with roots in a bloody turf war between an upstart union and the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), has sent world platinum prices soaring.
The police shooting of 34 Lonmin strikers on August 16 - the bloodiest security incident since the end of apartheid in 1994 - also piled pressure on President Jacob Zuma, who was forced to call in the army to back up stretched police.
And economists say the precedent set by the big Lonmin pay rises could ripple through an economy already saddled with uncompetitive labor costs, stoking inflation and curbing the central bank's ability to cut interest rates to boost sputtering growth.
"The company continues to be disappointed with the low turnout rate at four of its Rustenburg mines which are currently reporting less than 20 percent attendance," Amplats said in a statement.
It said its Rustenburg "process operations" had resumed full production but the mood among strikers was uncompromising.
"We'll buy 20 liters of petrol and if police get violent, we'll make petrol bombs and throw them at them," said Lawrence Mudise, an Amplats rock driller, holding a sign demanding 16,700 rand ($2,000) a month, a hefty premium on his current salary.
Police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse a crowd of men carrying spears and machetes in a squatter camp near the site on Wednesday.
"We'll not go to work until we get what we want. Our kids have been shot at, our families have been terrorized and brutalized, but we are not going back to work," one miner, who did not wish to be named, told Reuters.
LONMIN JUBILATION
A few kilometers away at Lonmin's Marikana mine, thousands of workers reported for their first shift since early August, ending one of the bloodiest bouts of industrial action in the 18 years since the end of white-minority rule.
Many shouted "We are reporting for work" in Fanagalo, a pidgin mix of Zulu, English and other African languages.
The miners were in jubilant mood after securing wage rises of up to 22 percent. "I feel very happy that I can go back to work now," said Nqukwe Sabulelo, a rock-driller at the mine. "I'm going to live well now."
The hefty wage settlement has stirred up trouble in the gold sector, with some 15,000 miners at the KDC West operation of Gold Fields, the world's fourth largest bullion producer, holding an illegal strike.
The Gold Fields protest is fuelled by discontent with the local leadership of the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and their stance has been given fresh impetus by the Lonmin settlement.
Gold Fields said this week it would not entertain demands for a minimum wage of 12,500 rand despite losing 1,400 ounces a day - close to 15 percent of group production.
NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni said the union, a key political ally of the ruling African National Congress, was trying to help.
The stand-off threatens the NUM-dominated collective wage-bargaining that has typified South African industrial relations since apartheid.
"We are trying to narrow the demands and get them to go back while we negotiate," Baleni told reporters.
Part of the African National Congress-led ruling alliance, the country's biggest group of unions this week acknowledged the challenge posed by the rise of the militant AMCU union and the need for change.
"The labor movement needs to renew itself," said Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
"There is the danger of finding ourselves ... outflanked by the new independent unions which are emerging as a result of dissatisfaction from the shop floor."
(Additional reporting by Joshua Nhlapo and Peroshni Govender; writing by Agnieszka Flak and Ed Stoddard; editing by Ed Cropley and Andrew Roche)
Rice launches sweeping Energy and Environment InitiativePublic release date: 20-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice University today announced the Energy and Environment Initiative (E2I), a sweeping plan to support interdisciplinary research that will draw experts from every corner of the university to work with Houston's energy industry to overcome barriers to the sustainable development and use of current and alternative forms of energy.
"One of the most critical global issues of our time is the challenge of meeting the world population's escalating need for energy and simultaneously safeguarding the environment," said Rice President David Leebron. "Rice's location in Houston, the global energy capital, uniquely positions us to serve both our city and our world by offering rich insights and practical but innovative solutions to this daunting challenge. Not only will we explore issues related to the safe harvesting and use of traditional hydrocarbons, but also advance the next generation of energy sources, from biofuels to solar. These efforts will draw on our deep strengths and capabilities from across the university, including in basic science, engineering, nanotechnology, informatics, social sciences, humanities and public policy."
Rice Provost George McLendon said E2I is unique among university activities in this space because it recognizes that addressing challenges in energy requires more than just technological solutions. Building on a strong foundation, E2I researchers will study energy policy and markets, finance and management, as well as the cultural and societal values that underpin and sometimes undermine public discussion about energy and the environment. Rice's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy is already an internationally recognized leader in energy economics and policy. Rice laboratories conduct about $40 million in energy-related research each year, and McLendon said Rice will invest about $1 million this fiscal year to start E2I seed-funding programs and establish an infrastructure to link existing activities across departments and schools. Future investments will be linked to research growth.
"E2I sprang partly from a realization that Rice is already doing excellent energy-related research and education," McLendon said. "We have significant federal support for research on topics as diverse as enhanced oil recovery, carbon sequestration and next-generation solar power. Rice's research in energy economics and energy policy is globally recognized. Our top-ranked Jones Graduate School of Business serves the energy industry through its MBA concentration in energy and its executive education program. We have existing relationships with companies such as Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Total, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and Apache. Finally, Rice partnered with the Mellon Foundation last year to pioneer the field of 'energy humanities' research."
McLendon said a central focus of E2I will be the diverse issues associated with managing society's current reliance on hydrocarbons while also preparing for a future where conventional and alternative sources of energy coexist.
"This is about building a bridge from today's fossil fuel economy to an all-of-the-above energy future in which all sources of energy are used in concert," he said. "Building this bridge is as much a political, economic and social challenge as a technical one."
E2I will be led by a committee chaired by Pedro Alvarez, Rice's George R. Brown Professor and chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. The committee members are Ken Medlock, the James A. Baker III and Susan G. Baker Fellow in Energy and Resource Economics at the Baker Institute and adjunct assistant professor in economics; Alan Levander, Rice's Carey Croneis Professor of Earth Science and director of Rice's data analysis and visualization cyberinfrastructure (DAVinCI) project; Dominic Boyer, associate professor of anthropology; and William Arnold, professor in the practice of energy management at the Jones School. A national search for a permanent faculty director will begin in 2013.
Medlock said balancing the goals of energy security and sustainability is critical to ensuring the welfare of future generations.
"Energy demands and the environmental impacts of energy development and use are now a central theme in policy discourse, largely due to the rapid growth of domestic shale gas and shale oil production," Medlock said. "Understanding the consequence of actions taken today on future generations is critical to understanding the direction of energy prices, fuel choice and environmental impact, all of which are vital to formulating informed policy."
Alvarez said part of E2I's initial focus will include the enhanced discovery and recovery of conventional hydrocarbons as well as the responsible development of shale gas and unconventional hydrocarbons. In all of these areas, innovative technologies that increase the efficiency and performance of both hydrocarbons and water processing are vital -- a broad topic termed the "water-energy nexus."
"Water is used either directly or indirectly in virtually every form of energy production and generation, and a significant fraction of urban energy demand relates to treating and moving water," said Alvarez, an award-winning environmental engineer and member of the Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board. "We can significantly change the impact of energy production and use by applying the latest developments in biotechnology, adaptation and nanotechnology to the problems of water."
E2I will also spur new technical research in fields as diverse as nanotechnology, geophysics and computer science.
"The search for oil and gas relies heavily on supercomputers, and Rice's faculty have long been at the forefront of computational geophysics and computer science," said Levander, faculty director of the DAVinCI project's new Chevron Visualization Laboratory, a 3-D visualization studio that is connected to one of Rice's newest and fastest high performance computers (HPC). Levander said E2I will allow Rice to initiate new lines of computationally based energy-related research from seismic imaging to modeling fluid flow in oil reservoirs. It will also allow Rice to expand programs like the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology's Rice Oil and Gas HPC Workshop, which has doubled in attendance in less than five years.
E2I will also allow Rice to grow its energy humanities program, a new field Rice helped launch during the past year with the Cultures of Energy Initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation.
"As much as understanding our energy landscape today and planning for a better tomorrow are about developing excellent science, engineering and policy, it is also vital to understand the values, choices, meanings and institutions that help explain how humans use energy and why," said Boyer, a founding member of the Cultures of Energy Initiative. "E2I is the only energy and environmental initiative in the world that truly takes the skills and input of the humanities and social sciences seriously, and that input is much needed because it helps us answer a number of important questions: What makes one form of energy seem 'dirty' and another 'clean'? How do our desires and self-image translate into certain kinds of environmental action or inaction? How do culture and power contribute to the challenges of developing international responses to global warming?"
McLendon said building the bridge from today to tomorrow's energy future will require all of the resources that universities can bring to bear.
"E2I is visionary because it is the first initiative in energy research that truly leverages all the intellectual resources of a university," he said. "E2I will engage government, the corporate world and everyday citizens in its efforts to better understand how we use energy today and how we are going to use it tomorrow."
###
A high-resolution image is available for download at:
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/0921_NRG_LG2.jpg
CAPTION: Rice University's Energy and Environment Initiative will engage researchers and scholars from every corner of campus to address the complex challenges of energy in the 21st century.
CREDIT: Rice University
This release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Rice launches sweeping Energy and Environment InitiativePublic release date: 20-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice University today announced the Energy and Environment Initiative (E2I), a sweeping plan to support interdisciplinary research that will draw experts from every corner of the university to work with Houston's energy industry to overcome barriers to the sustainable development and use of current and alternative forms of energy.
"One of the most critical global issues of our time is the challenge of meeting the world population's escalating need for energy and simultaneously safeguarding the environment," said Rice President David Leebron. "Rice's location in Houston, the global energy capital, uniquely positions us to serve both our city and our world by offering rich insights and practical but innovative solutions to this daunting challenge. Not only will we explore issues related to the safe harvesting and use of traditional hydrocarbons, but also advance the next generation of energy sources, from biofuels to solar. These efforts will draw on our deep strengths and capabilities from across the university, including in basic science, engineering, nanotechnology, informatics, social sciences, humanities and public policy."
Rice Provost George McLendon said E2I is unique among university activities in this space because it recognizes that addressing challenges in energy requires more than just technological solutions. Building on a strong foundation, E2I researchers will study energy policy and markets, finance and management, as well as the cultural and societal values that underpin and sometimes undermine public discussion about energy and the environment. Rice's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy is already an internationally recognized leader in energy economics and policy. Rice laboratories conduct about $40 million in energy-related research each year, and McLendon said Rice will invest about $1 million this fiscal year to start E2I seed-funding programs and establish an infrastructure to link existing activities across departments and schools. Future investments will be linked to research growth.
"E2I sprang partly from a realization that Rice is already doing excellent energy-related research and education," McLendon said. "We have significant federal support for research on topics as diverse as enhanced oil recovery, carbon sequestration and next-generation solar power. Rice's research in energy economics and energy policy is globally recognized. Our top-ranked Jones Graduate School of Business serves the energy industry through its MBA concentration in energy and its executive education program. We have existing relationships with companies such as Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Total, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and Apache. Finally, Rice partnered with the Mellon Foundation last year to pioneer the field of 'energy humanities' research."
McLendon said a central focus of E2I will be the diverse issues associated with managing society's current reliance on hydrocarbons while also preparing for a future where conventional and alternative sources of energy coexist.
"This is about building a bridge from today's fossil fuel economy to an all-of-the-above energy future in which all sources of energy are used in concert," he said. "Building this bridge is as much a political, economic and social challenge as a technical one."
E2I will be led by a committee chaired by Pedro Alvarez, Rice's George R. Brown Professor and chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. The committee members are Ken Medlock, the James A. Baker III and Susan G. Baker Fellow in Energy and Resource Economics at the Baker Institute and adjunct assistant professor in economics; Alan Levander, Rice's Carey Croneis Professor of Earth Science and director of Rice's data analysis and visualization cyberinfrastructure (DAVinCI) project; Dominic Boyer, associate professor of anthropology; and William Arnold, professor in the practice of energy management at the Jones School. A national search for a permanent faculty director will begin in 2013.
Medlock said balancing the goals of energy security and sustainability is critical to ensuring the welfare of future generations.
"Energy demands and the environmental impacts of energy development and use are now a central theme in policy discourse, largely due to the rapid growth of domestic shale gas and shale oil production," Medlock said. "Understanding the consequence of actions taken today on future generations is critical to understanding the direction of energy prices, fuel choice and environmental impact, all of which are vital to formulating informed policy."
Alvarez said part of E2I's initial focus will include the enhanced discovery and recovery of conventional hydrocarbons as well as the responsible development of shale gas and unconventional hydrocarbons. In all of these areas, innovative technologies that increase the efficiency and performance of both hydrocarbons and water processing are vital -- a broad topic termed the "water-energy nexus."
"Water is used either directly or indirectly in virtually every form of energy production and generation, and a significant fraction of urban energy demand relates to treating and moving water," said Alvarez, an award-winning environmental engineer and member of the Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board. "We can significantly change the impact of energy production and use by applying the latest developments in biotechnology, adaptation and nanotechnology to the problems of water."
E2I will also spur new technical research in fields as diverse as nanotechnology, geophysics and computer science.
"The search for oil and gas relies heavily on supercomputers, and Rice's faculty have long been at the forefront of computational geophysics and computer science," said Levander, faculty director of the DAVinCI project's new Chevron Visualization Laboratory, a 3-D visualization studio that is connected to one of Rice's newest and fastest high performance computers (HPC). Levander said E2I will allow Rice to initiate new lines of computationally based energy-related research from seismic imaging to modeling fluid flow in oil reservoirs. It will also allow Rice to expand programs like the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology's Rice Oil and Gas HPC Workshop, which has doubled in attendance in less than five years.
E2I will also allow Rice to grow its energy humanities program, a new field Rice helped launch during the past year with the Cultures of Energy Initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation.
"As much as understanding our energy landscape today and planning for a better tomorrow are about developing excellent science, engineering and policy, it is also vital to understand the values, choices, meanings and institutions that help explain how humans use energy and why," said Boyer, a founding member of the Cultures of Energy Initiative. "E2I is the only energy and environmental initiative in the world that truly takes the skills and input of the humanities and social sciences seriously, and that input is much needed because it helps us answer a number of important questions: What makes one form of energy seem 'dirty' and another 'clean'? How do our desires and self-image translate into certain kinds of environmental action or inaction? How do culture and power contribute to the challenges of developing international responses to global warming?"
McLendon said building the bridge from today to tomorrow's energy future will require all of the resources that universities can bring to bear.
"E2I is visionary because it is the first initiative in energy research that truly leverages all the intellectual resources of a university," he said. "E2I will engage government, the corporate world and everyday citizens in its efforts to better understand how we use energy today and how we are going to use it tomorrow."
###
A high-resolution image is available for download at:
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/0921_NRG_LG2.jpg
CAPTION: Rice University's Energy and Environment Initiative will engage researchers and scholars from every corner of campus to address the complex challenges of energy in the 21st century.
CREDIT: Rice University
This release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
ScienceDaily (Sep. 19, 2012) ? With the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team of astronomers led by Wei Zheng of The Johns Hopkins University has spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever detected.
Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old.
The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called "Dark Ages." During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy accordingly opens up a window into the deepest, remotest epochs of cosmic history.
"This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence," said Zheng, a principal research scientist in The Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins' Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and lead author of a paper appearing in Nature on Sept. 20. "Future work involving this galaxy -- as well as others like it that we hope to find -- will allow us to study the universe's earliest objects and how the Dark Ages ended."
Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. In other words, the starlight snagged by Spitzer and Hubble left the galaxy when the universe was just 3.6 percent of its present age. Technically speaking, the galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6. The term "redshift" refers to how much an object's light has shifted into longer wavelengths as a result of the expansion of the universe. Astronomers use "redshift" to describe cosmic distances.
Unlike previous detections of galaxy candidates in this age range, which were only glimpsed in a single color, or waveband, this newfound galaxy has been seen in five different wavebands. As part of the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble program (CLASH), the Hubble Space Telescope registered the newly described far-flung galaxy in four wavelength bands. Spitzer located it in a fifth band with its Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), placing the discovery on firmer ground.
Objects at these extreme distances are mostly beyond the detection sensitivity of today's largest telescopes. To catch sight of these early, distant galaxies, astronomers rely on "gravitational lensing." In this phenomenon -- predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago -- the gravity of foreground objects warps and magnifies the light from background objects. A massive galaxy cluster situated between our galaxy and the early galaxy magnified the latter's light, brightening the remote object some 15 times and bringing it into view.
Based on the Spitzer and Hubble observations, astronomers think the distant galaxy was spied at a time when it was less than 200 million years old. It also is small and compact, containing only about 1 percent of the Milky Way's mass. According to leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should indeed have started out tiny. They then progressively merged, eventually accumulating into the sizable galaxies of the more modern universe.
These first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the epoch of reionization, the event that signaled the demise of the universe's Dark Ages. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles. The first luminous stars and their host galaxies, however, did not emerge until a few hundred million years later. The energy released by these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the universe to ionize, or lose an electron, the state in which the gas has remained since that time.
"In essence, during the epoch of reionization, the lights came on in the universe," said paper co-author Leonidas Moustakas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
Astronomers plan to study the rise of the first stars and galaxies and the epoch of reionization with the successor to both Spitzer and Hubble -- NASA's James Webb Telescope, slated for launch in 2018. The newly described distant galaxy will likely be a prime target.
Holland Ford, one of Zheng's colleagues and a co-author on the paper, commented on the findings.
"Science is very exciting when we explore the frontiers of knowledge," said Ford, a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins. "One of these frontiers is the first few hundred million years after the birth of our universe. Dr. Zheng's many years of searching for quasars and galaxies in the dawn of the universe has paid off with his discovery of a galaxy that we see as it was when the universe was less than 500 million years old.
"With his discovery, we are seeing a galaxy when it was not even a toddler," Ford said. "But this infant galaxy will in its future grow to be a galaxy like our own, hopefully hosting planetary systems with astronomers who will look back in time and see our galaxy in its infancy."
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins University, via Newswise. The original article was written by Lisa DeNike.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Wei Zheng, Marc Postman, Adi Zitrin, John Moustakas, Xinwen Shu, Stephanie Jouvel, Ole H?st, Alberto Molino, Larry Bradley, Dan Coe, Leonidas A. Moustakas, Mauricio Carrasco, Holland Ford, Narciso Ben?tez, Tod R. Lauer, Stella Seitz, Rychard Bouwens, Anton Koekemoer, Elinor Medezinski, Matthias Bartelmann, Tom Broadhurst, Megan Donahue, Claudio Grillo, Leopoldo Infante, Saurabh W. Jha, Daniel D. Kelson, Ofer Lahav, Doron Lemze, Peter Melchior, Massimo Meneghetti, Julian Merten, Mario Nonino, Sara Ogaz, Piero Rosati, Keiichi Umetsu, Arjen van der Wel. A magnified young galaxy from about 500 million years after the Big Bang. Nature, 2012; 489 (7416): 406 DOI: 10.1038/nature11446
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
If you are on a shoestring budget you?ll need to resort to free methods, such as blogging, videos, articles, press releases (we call this ?content marketing?). ? It will take more time to create a steady lead flow with these than with paid methods, but do NOT wait to get started until you?ve got an advertising budget! Just get started?NOW. :) ? ?
What?s a good marketing budget, you?re asking?
? The answer is, the bigger, the better. That?s assuming you invest it wisely, of course. You want to be very careful while testing, then, as you see you are getting an ROI (Return On Investment), you ramp it up. ? $500-$700 a month will be a decent budget for most any Internet network marketing business. With this kind of a budget you can outsource some article and press release writing, you can use Traffic Geyser to get more exposure for your videos, and/or you can invest in some solo ads or banner advertising. ? If your monthly advertising budget of $700+, another option would be pay-per-click (PPC). Right now, Facebook ads is the PPC strategy I?d personally go with. Once you?ve got this technique down, you should be able to generate leads for less than $5 apiece. ? ?
If you ever pay more than five bucks apiece for any kind of leads, you?re paying too much.
?
At this stage in your Internet network marketing business your goal is to build to ?critical mass?. 30 leads a day is what we consider to be be ?critical mass?, as this is what you require to create momentum. ? Your objective right now is to determine which strategies actually produce for you so that you can keep doing more of what?s working and ditch what isn?t. ? Which is also why you MUST track all your traffic. Otherwise, as I discussed in yesterday?s post, how will you know where your leads and sales are coming from? ? ?
The 2nd Stage Of Building Your Internet Network Marketing Business: The Tweaking Stage.
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Here, you?re focusing on becoming profitable, and then to further increase your profits. You?ve made your first few sales: You know how to get leads and turn them into profits.
I want to give credit where credit is due: Many of the concepts in this post were taught to me by the brilliant Jim Yaghi (my left) and his friend David Schwind.
Now you?ll want to tweak your offer so as to increase your ROI (Return On Investment), in other words, to get more bang for your advertising bucks. ? Here are a few examples of how this can be done:
Adding time sensitive bonuses to your offer to get more of your prospects to take immediate action.
Testing different price points for your offer.
Continuously optimizing advertising campaigns to produce more leads at less cost.
Tweaking headlines and sales copy.
Communicating with your list (i.e. leads) more regularly via broadcast emails and/or on the social networks in order to increase trust.
? You?ll likely want to do all of the above, and more (but not all at once!) When it comes to tweaking, the options of what you can do are practically unlimited, and therefore this stage of building your Internet network marketing business will usually also be the lengthiest one. ? ?
The 3rd Stage Of Building Your Internet Network Marketing Business: The Scaling Stage.
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At this point you?re getting leads consistently. You?ve got an offer that?s working. You?ve determined your target market. You?ve got a funnel that?s converting, and you?ve gotten lead costs down. You?re making good money ? way to go! ? Now your goal is to create more leverage?to get your offer in more places and in front of more people, so you can build your Internet network marketing business more effectively and in a more automated fashion. This, so you can produce better results with less effort.
At the scaling stage, life is not so bad.
If the product you?re marketing is your own, perhaps at this point you?ll start taking in affiliates who can market your products for you in return for a commission. ? If the only marketing platform you?ve been using so far is Facebook ads, you may decide to add banners to your marketing arsenal. ? Or you hire a freelancer on Odesk.com to do article marketing for you. ? If your products are relevant to people in other countries, you may also want to consider marketing internationally? ?
The cool thing is that at the scaling stage, because you?re actually profitable and have a marketing budget, you can afford to outsource a lot of the work. :) ? ?
So, there you have it?those are what you could call ?the three stages? of building a successful Internet network marketing business?
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Now, they will overlap somewhat, and you?ll likely find yourself going back and forth a bit between stages 1 and 2, and between 2 and 3. But hopefully this helps you better see the bigger picture. ? Does it still seem a bit daunting? ? If so, I recommend you get started with the Attraction Marketing System and training platform known as My Lead System PRO (MLSP). With MLSP you?ll instantly get access to tried-and-tested, highly converting, pre-made funnels, websites, lead capture pages and follow up emails. ? The MSLP marketing material can be used very effectively with any online MLM or internet network marketing business. Take your risk free test-drive right below. ? ? leave me a comment below ? otherwise, how will I know you stopped by? ;) ? ? PS: Don?t want to go through the pain of having to create your own funnel and pages from scratch? Want access to live and recorded marketing webinars with our industry?s top earners (yours truly included)? Click here to take your 14-day risk free test-drive of MLSP right now. ? ? ? ? Successfully, ? ? 5x Award Winning Marketer ? Industry Top Earner ? Get Her Success Blueprint ? ? ? ?
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