JUST KEEPING YOU UPDATED..........

UPDATE ON NELSON MANDELA...........


JOHANNESBURG — Former South African leader Nelson Mandela has been in a hospital for nearly a month.
There was no official update Saturday morning on the condition of the 94-year-old former president, who is in critical but stable condition after being diagnosed with a recurring lung infection. He was taken to a hospital in Pretoria, the capital, on June 8.
The government has said Mandela is not in a vegetative state, contrary to recent court documents. A close friend told Sky News that the anti-apartheid leader was conscious and responsive earlier this week.
There has been an outpouring of concern in South Africa and around the world for Mandela, a transformative figure who led the tense shift from white rule to democracy two decades ago in a spirit of reconciliation














TWO MEN FREE OF HIV AFTER UNDERGOING STEM- CELL THERAPY.....



KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Two HIV-positive patients in the United States who underwent bone marrow transplants for cancer have stopped anti-retroviral therapy and still show no detectable sign of the HIV virus, researchers said Wednesday.
The Harvard University researchers stressed it was too early to say the men have been cured, but said it was an encouraging sign that the virus hasn't rebounded in their blood months after drug treatment ended.
The first person reported to be cured of HIV, American Timothy Ray Brown, underwent a stem cell transplant in 2007 to treat his leukemia. He was reported by his German doctors to have been cured of HIV two years later.

Brown's doctors used a donor who had a rare genetic mutation that provides resistance against HIV. So far, no one has observed similar results using ordinary donor cells such as those given to the two patients by the Harvard University researchers.

The researchers, Timothy Henrich and Daniel Kuritzkes of the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, announced last year that blood samples taken from the men — who both had blood cancers — showed no traces of the HIV virus eight months after they received bone marrow transplants to replace cancerous blood cells with healthy donor cells. The men were still on anti-HIV drugs at the time.

The men have both since stopped anti-retroviral therapy — one 15 weeks ago and the other seven weeks ago — and show no signs of the virus, Henrich told an international AIDS conference in Malaysia on Wednesday.
"They are doing very well," Henrich said. "While these results are exciting, they do not yet indicate that the men have been cured. Only time will tell."
The HIV virus may be hiding in other organs such as the liver, spleen or brain and could return months later, he warned.

Further testing of the men's cells, plasma and tissue for at least a year will help give a clearer picture on the full impact of the transplant on HIV persistence, he said.
Kuritzkes said the patients will be put back on the drugs if there is a viral rebound.
A rebound will show that other sites are important reservoirs of infectious virus and new approaches to measuring these reservoirs will be needed in developing a cure, Henrich said.

"These findings clearly provide important new information that might well alter the current thinking about HIV and gene therapy," Kevin Robert Frost, chief executive of The Foundation of AIDS Research, said in a statement. "While stem cell transplantation is not a viable option for people with HIV on a broad scale because of its costs and complexity, these new cases could lead us to new approaches to treating, and ultimately even eradicating, HIV."












UPDATE ON TRAYVON MARTIN TRIAL.......



SANFORD, Fla. — Jurors in the George Zimmerman trial are heading into their weekend with a lot of courtroom drama and conflicting testimony to digest.
Friday's action-packed session saw the prosecution rest its case, and the judge reject a defense request to acquit Zimmerman of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year.
The mothers of both Martin and Zimmerman listened to the same 911 recording of someone screaming for help, and each said she was convinced the voice was that of her own son.

The question of whose voice is on the recording could be crucial to the jury in deciding who was the aggressor in the confrontation between the neighborhood-watch volunteer and the teenager.
"I heard my son screaming," Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, said firmly after she was played a recording in which distant, high-pitched wails could be heard in the background as a Zimmerman neighbor asked a dispatcher to send police. Moments later on the call, there was a gunshot and the crying stopped.
Gladys Zimmerman, though, testified she recognized the voice all too well, "My son." Asked how she could be certain, she said, "Because it's my son."
Martin's half brother, 22-year-old Jahvaris Fulton, testified that the cries came from the teen. And Zimmerman's uncle, Jose Meza, said he knew it was Zimmerman's voice from "the moment I heard it. ... I thought, that is George."
After Friday's session was over, defense attorney Mark O'Mara told reporters "there will be a lot of other witnesses" who will testify that the voice on the call is George Zimmerman's.
"But we'll just present the case," he said. "We're just getting started."

Gladys Zimmerman was the defense's first witness. O'Mara said he expects to call "several" of the state's 38 witnesses back as well when trial resumes Monday, and he left open the possibility that he would try to introduce toxicology evidence showing Martin had marijuana in his system at the time he died. Judge Debra Nelson has denied the admission of that evidence for the time being.
O'Mara also may call witnesses who he says have stated that Zimmerman was not a racist. Part of the prosecution's theory is that Zimmerman profiled Martin as one of the young black men he'd called law enforcement about as being possible suspects in burglaries in his townhome community weeks before the shooting.
O'Mara said he could rest his case as soon as next week.
Immediately after the state rested Friday, he asked Nelson to acquit Zimmerman, arguing that the prosecution had failed to prove its case.
O'Mara said an "enormous" amount of evidence showed that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, and he argued that Zimmerman had reasonable grounds to believe he was in danger and acted without the "ill will, hatred and spite" necessary to prove second-degree murder.
But prosecutor Richard Mantei countered: "There are two people involved here. One of them is dead, and one of them is a liar."

Mantei told the judge that Zimmerman had changed his story, that his account of how he shot Martin was "a physical impossibility" and that he exaggerated his wounds.
After listening to an hour and a half of arguments from both sides, Nelson refused to throw out the murder charge, saying the prosecution had presented sufficient evidence for the case to go on.
Earlier in the day, Sybrina Fulton introduced herself to the jury by describing herself as having two sons, one of whom "is in heaven." She sat expressionless on the witness stand while prosecutors played the 911 recording.
"Who do you recognize that to be?" prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda asked her.
"Trayvon Benjamin Martin," she replied.
During cross-examination, O'Mara suggested — haltingly, in apparent recognition of the sensitivity of the questioning — that Fulton may have been influenced by others who listened to the 911 call, including relatives and her former husband.
O'Mara asked Fulton hypothetically whether she would have to accept that it was Zimmerman yelling for help if the screams did not come from her son. He also asked Fulton whether she hoped Martin didn't do anything that led to his death.
"I would hope for this to never have happened and he would still be here," she said.
O'Mara asked Jahvaris Fulton why he told a reporter last year that he wasn't sure if the voice belonged to Martin. Jahvaris Fulton explained that he was "shocked" when he heard it.
"I didn't want to believe it was him," he said.
The doctor who performed an autopsy on Martin also took the stand. Associate Medical Examiner Shiping Bao started describing Martin as being in pain and suffering after he was shot, but defense attorneys objected and the judge directed Bao away from that line of questioning.
He later estimated that Martin lived one to 10 minutes after he was shot and said the bullet went from the front to the back of the teen's chest, piercing his heart.
"There was no chance he could survive," Bao said.
With jurors out of the courtroom, Bao acknowledged under defense questioning he had changed his opinion in recent weeks on two matters related to the teen's death — how long Martin was alive after being shot and the effect of marijuana detected in Martin's body at the time of his death.
Bao said in November that he believed Martin was alive one to three minutes. He also said Friday that marijuana could have affected Martin physically or mentally; he said the opposite last year.









777 CRASH LANDS AT SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT.........


By Terry Collins of Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — An Asiana Airlines flight crashed while landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday, killing at least two people, injuring dozens of others and forcing passengers to jump down the emergency inflatable slides to safety as flames tore through the plane.
One person was unaccounted for from among the 307 passengers and crew, said airport spokesman Doug Yakel. He said 181 people were taken to local hospitals. There were 291 passengers and 16 crew members.

San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said the investigation has been turned over to the FBI and terrorism has been ruled out.
The Federal Aviation Administration said Flight 214 from Seoul, South Korea, crashed while landing before noon PDT.














Missing Madeleine McCann: What you need to know........


More than six years after Madeleine McCann vanished from a holiday resort in Portugal while on a family vacation, British police are launching their own investigation into the U.K. girl's disappearance.
Here are some key questions and events surrounding the case, which has attracted international attention.
Who is Madeleine McCann?
Madeleine, from the U.K., was on vacation in Portugal with her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, her twin siblings, and a group of family friends and their children. She disappeared May 3, 2007, from her parents' holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in Portugal's Algarve region as her parents were dining at a tapas restaurant 100 yards away. Kate McCann said when she went to check on the children at 10 p.m., Madeleine was missing. She was nine days shy of her 4th birthday.
Investigators feared the child had been abducted. The search for her spanned several countries but so far has turned up nothing but dead ends.
What's new in the case?
Scotland Yard announced Thursday that it was launching its own investigation, saying it had "genuinely new" lines of inquiry and believed there is a chance she is still alive. U.K. police want to trace 38 "persons of interest" — 12 of the individuals are British and the rest from a variety of European countries.
Police also released a new computer-generated image that shows how Madeleine might look now at age 10.