Texas boy suspended over NBA shave scores tickets

This family photo shows Patrick Gonzalez, 12, with an image of San Antonio Spurs' Matt Bonner shaved into his head, at his home in San Antonio on Tuesday, May 15, 2012. Gonzalez was suspended for a day from Woodlake Hills Middle School because the district deemed his $75 haircut a distraction. He returned to class Thursday after reluctantly shaving his head. (AP Photo/Rachel Delgado)

This family photo shows Patrick Gonzalez, 12, with an image of San Antonio Spurs' Matt Bonner shaved into his head, at his home in San Antonio on Tuesday, May 15, 2012. Gonzalez was suspended for a day from Woodlake Hills Middle School because the district deemed his $75 haircut a distraction. He returned to class Thursday after reluctantly shaving his head. (AP Photo/Rachel Delgado)

This family photo shows Patrick Gonzalez, 12, with an image of San Antonio Spurs' Matt Bonner shaved into his head, at his home in San Antonio on Tuesday, May 15, 2012. Gonzalez was suspended for a day from Woodlake Hills Middle School because the district deemed his $75 haircut a distraction. He returned to class Thursday after reluctantly shaving his head. (AP Photo/Rachel Delgado)

SAN ANTONIO (AP) ? A 12-year-old Texas boy who was suspended from school after shaving his head to resemble the face of Spurs forward Matt Bonner scored tickets to a playoff game and props from his favorite NBA player.

Patrick Gonzalez was suspended for a day from Woodlake Hills Middle School because the school district deemed his $75 haircut a distraction. He returned to class Thursday after reluctantly shaving his head.

Gonzalez says Bonner is his favorite player, noting they're both redheads.

Bonner, whose mother is a teacher, says the school could have just moved Gonzalez to the back of the room. Bonner encouraged Gonzalez to "keep supporting us redheads in the NBA."

Gonzalez's story prompted the Spurs to give him and his family tickets to Thursday's playoff game ? against the Clippers.

Associated Press

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Pumping concrete with the Laos Olympic team

The sun is setting over the scruffy outdoor stadium as Kilakone Siphonexay, the fastest man in Laos, lies on the home-made, wooden weights bench, raises both arms and grips the scaffolding pole above.

On either end of the metal spar, paint-tins filled with concrete serve as weights, forming a makeshift barbell to hone the muscles of the poor, Southeast Asian country's leading Olympic hope.

"There's no weights room," says the thin, bespectacled 100 metres sprinter with an apologetic smile, before pumping some quick bench-presses aided by his coach.

When it comes to the Olympics, there are the strong nations, the less good, the weak and the abject. Communist Laos is in the last category. But with facilities like this, it's hardly a surprise.

The landlocked country, which was extensively bombed during the war in neighbouring Vietnam and ranks as one of the world's poorest states, has not only never won an Olympic medal -- it hasn't even come close.

In an Olympic history stretching back to Moscow 1980, no Laotian competitor has ever made it past the first round, where required. Success at the coming Games in London would be easily defined: not finishing last.

"We're not strong like the USA or the British," chef de mission Kasem Inthara tells AFP, as he sits in a dingy stadium office. "We're in a group like Brunei or East Timor. We're a small country.

"If we can beat only one country in the first heat, that would be a success."

Even getting to London would be a victory after not one Laotian qualified for the 2012 Games by right, leaving them waiting for special dispensations to compete in athletics, swimming and taekwondo.

Kilakone, 23, clings to this hope after missing the 100m qualifying time of 10.24 seconds, already snail-like compared to Usain Bolt's world record of 9.58 sec. The personal best of Kilakone, Laos's national champion, is 10.73 sec.

"I like to train hard," he says. "In London, I would like to try my best to beat my personal record. But we're still lacking weight training. I need weight training and equipment."

Kilakone, wearing an Arsenal football team shirt and tight running trousers, trains for three hours each evening in Chao Anouvong Stadium, an ageing facility in the heart of the capital, Vientiane, which dates back to pre-communist 1961.

Vandalised advertising hoardings are strewn on the floor and children noisily chase a football as Kilakone jostles for space on the track with dozens of other amateur enthusiasts on a warm, sticky evening.

For Kilakone, and female 100m hopeful Lealy Phoukhavont, 16, it's a simple routine consisting mainly of sprinting and acceleration work. Weight training is minimal, and specialist nutrition is non-existent.

"They don't eat anything special. They eat with their families," says coach Chaleunsouk Aoudomphanh, who seems surprised at the question. Kilakone says he eats "local food -- sticky rice and vegetables".

Chaleunsouk himself shouldered the hopes of Laos at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, where he ran his 100m heat in a disappointing 11.30 sec -- a time he still remembers with a rueful shake of the head.

Now he trains Kilakone and Lealy as a part-time volunteer, in between the demands of looking after his newborn daughter and helping run a small business at a Vientiane market.

"I take standard training courses and modify some parts of them," explains Chaleunsouk, who has coaching qualifications with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

"Because we don't have the equipment, and you have to take into account the individuals -- everything's different, but I modify the training so it's suitable for Laos people."

According to chef de mission Kasem, the challenges facing Laos's athletes are simple: no facilities, few competitions, and the weather is too hot. Plus, the people are too short, he says.

"Even in the Southeast Asian Games we can't get medals from swimming and athletics because if compared to the morphology of more talented people, we are short! Shorter than the others," says Kasem.

While such problems are not easy to fix, more money would help. However, with Laos aid-dependent and short of major industry, grants and sponsorship are not forthcoming.

Laos students have sports on their curriculum, but many schools have no facilities. And there are few opportunities for athletes -- just the national, military, police and university games which are held in rotation, one per year.

Kasem has been ever-present in Laos's Olympic campaigns since he went to Moscow 1980 as a coach. But when asked to describe the country's best moment at a Games, he is at a loss.

"We just like to participate, we don't expect to get a medal," he shrugs. "If we can't develop to the top ranking, we can't compete."

If only petanque were an Olympic sport, things might be different. Laos is a gold medal winner at Southeast Asian Games level in the popular bowling game, a legacy of French colonialism.

Until that day, the Laos's Olympic dream rests largely with Kilakone, Lealy, Chaleunsouk and their home-made weights in the sweaty, crowded Vientiane stadium.

Next to the paint-tin barbell, which weighs "about 20 kilos (40 pounds)", lies a heavier challenge: another scaffolding pole, but this one attached with two concrete-filled car wheels. The coach and athletes shake their heads.

"We hope we can get more equipment," says Chaleunsouk.

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Subdivisions go urban as housing market changes | Financial IQ

Why are a giants of a building industry, a creators for decades of vast communities of cookie-cutter homes, cul-de-sacs and McMansions in far-flung suburbs,doing an about-face? Why are they unexpected building smaller neighborhoods in and tighten to cities on land some-more expected to be circuitously a sight hire than a pig farm?

A housing courtesy solemnly jolt off a misfortune mercantile conditions in decades is rethinkingwhat form of housing to build and where to build it. It?s a response to a new call of home buyers who have no enterprise to live in normal subdivisions apart from civic amenities.

The nation?s expansion patterns might be during a ancestral connection as builders start to retreat 60-year-old trends. They?re changeable from hulk communities on wide-open ?greenfields? to compress ?infill? housing in already-developed civic settings.

The marketplace slack has given builders time to consider unconditional demographic changes that are transforming a approach Americans wish to live.

Young Millennialsand comparison Baby Boomers are rejecting normal suburban lifestyles in preference of civic vital and shorter commutes. Many wish to live circuitously city centers so they can travel to work, shops and restaurants or take open transportation. They also cite smaller homes since they?resingular or have no kids and don?t wish to spend their giveaway time progressing their homes.

?It?s a kids (ages 18 to 32), a dull nesters (Baby Boomers with no kids during home),? says Chris Leinberger, boss of Smart Growth America?s LOCUS (Latin for ?place?), a inhabitant bloc of genuine estate developers and investors who support civic developments that inspire walking over driving.?These dual generations total are some-more than half of a American population.?

The housing bust of a final 5 years strike hardest in subdivisions inremote suburbs, drying adult financing for such development. At a same time, gas prices soared and so did environmental consciousness, giving consumers postponement about vital in apart suburbs divided from services, jobs and entertainment.

California integrate Maurice Turner and his wife, Preet Bassi, used to lease in a coreof Anaheim. When they motionless to buy, they found their choices singular during first.

?The infancy of homes were single-family homes in a suburbs or comparison homes and multi-story condos in a city,? says Turner, executive manager in a circuitously city.

The 30-something professionals did not wish to leave city neighborhoods and settle in a suburban subdivision. And they didn?t wish to livein a multi-story condo building.

That was about a time Brookfield Homes, a heading developer of outrageoussuburban subdivisions, began Colony Park ? some-more than 500 single-family homes, townhouses and condominiums in Anaheim?s Historic District on a site that once housed industrial warehouses. Many of a townhomes are opposite a travel from restaurants, party and other civic attractions.

Turner and Bassi now live in a three-story, 1,700-square-foot townhouse where they and their neighbors make ?a unwavering bid to spend reduction time in your automobile travelling and spend some-more time in your area with friends, neighbors, family,? Turner says. ?The civic sourroundings was a vast pivotal to staying.?

Growth patterns shift

Developers are listening since a marketplace has oral shrill and clear.

Latest Census information uncover that race expansion in border counties scarcely stopped in a 12 monthsthat finished Jul 1, 2011, and civic counties during a core of metro areas grew faster than a republic as a whole, a USA TODAY investigate found.

Central metro counties accounted for 94% of U.S. growth, compared with 85% usually before a retrogression and housing bust.

A new Case Western Reserve University investigate found that Cleveland?s middle city is flourishing faster than a suburbs for a initial time.

In Jan 2000, a top cost per block feet in a Washington, D.C., metro area was in a shaggy suburb of Great Falls, Va., according to Zillow, a genuine estate investigate firm. Ten years later, townhouses in a hip and civic Dupont Circle area of Washington were value 70% some-more per block feet than skill in Great Falls.

?These are a marketplace signals we?re removing via a country,? Leinberger says. ?The drivable suburban border is where a housing marketplace collapsed ? 80% of a collapsed marketplace was there. It?s a classical box of a genuine estate courtesy overproducing.?

Most vital builders have combined ?urban? groups in a past 5 years to director for accessible land in already-developed tools of cities and closer suburbs ? even if it means former industrial and blurb sites or land that might need environmental cleanup.

This change doesn?t meanta finish of sprawling suburban subdivisions in onetimecow pastures and corn fields, though it does vigilance a important change that could change a housing landscape for years to come.

?There has been a outrageous shift, quite in a final 10 years,? says Marie York, boss of genuine estate consulting York Solutions in Palm Beach County, Fla., and aresidence member of a American Planning Association. ?There?s an importance on walkability, an importance on health, an importance on travelling by bicycle ? a change divided from blatant consumerism and a McMansion model.?

The change is not temporary, says Gregory Vilkin, handling principal and boss of MacFarlane Partners, a San Francisco-based genuine estate investment association building 170 units on a site of former parking lots and automobile correct shops in South Lake Union, a new civic plan in Seattle.

Vilkin headed one of a nation?s largest civic redevelopments while during a helm of Forest City Enterprises? residential genuine estate division: Stapleton, a cluster of neighborhoods built on 7.5 block miles on a site of a aged Stapleton International Airport in Denver. Developers built 11 units per hactare compared with 4 per hactare in normal suburban subdivisions.

?I reject a grounds that (the shift) is usually since of a recession,? Vilkin says. ?It?s no longer a American dream to possess a tract of land with a residence on it and dual cars in a driveway.?

Adds Leinberger: ?This is a constructional change, not a cyclical downturn.?

Moving toward a center

Whether it?s proxy or a seminal impulse in a nation?s expansion history, a housing bust and retrogression have stirreddevelopers to set their sights inward. When skill values drop, so does investment. And since values forsaken a many on a outdoor edges of metro areas, developers are profitable courtesy to sites they never deliberate before.

?It creates we not demeanour during these vast properties on a corner of a Earth anymore,? says Denise Gammon, boss of a communities multiplication of Florida-based KitsonPartners. ?There?s a thespian change going on.?

Gammon also worked on Stapleton, and Kitson hired her to rise their infill business. In Tampa, a association is building Bay Pines, that will have multi-family housing, hotel, grocery store and shops on 60 acres that once was a site of a mobile home park.

?It?s an area of Tampa that hasn?t seen new housing in 25 years,? she says.?The compulsory indication is obsolete. People are looking for something different.?

In California, KB Home built Primera Terra during Playa Vista, circuitously Marina Del Rey, on a site of an aged Hughes Aircraftsite. The condos prominence appetite efficiency, vicinity to shops, parks and schools, and prices underneath $600,000 (no garages).

?It has drawn an implausible series of people,? says Steve Ruffner, boss of KB Home Southern California. ?People are unequivocally meddlesome in record in a home that?s not usually good for a sourroundings though saves them tenure costs ?Energy Star, solar.?

Executives of Dallas-based Huffines Communities sensed a series was stirring after attending a builders? uncover in Orlando in 2005 when they satisfied that investors were a widespread buyers of suburban housing ? not consumers.

The association had 9 supposed ?master-planned communities? in a works that would go adult on underdeveloped land in outdoor suburbia.

?We sole 6 and kept three,? says Robert Kembel, Huffines president. The association redeployed a collateral to redeveloping sites in cities. ?If people cite to live closer to a jobs center, a pricing we can authority is aloft and there?s reduction competition,? Kembel says.

Huffines is building Viridian, 5,000 units on a 2,300-acre site in a inundate plain circuitously a landfill in Arlington, Texas. The plan compulsory extensive and dear cleanup and wetlands replacement measures.

?Developers who have a calm to go to a city or county and negotiate public-private partnerships to assistance lessen outrageous costs, those are a guys who win,? Kembel says.

No time for vast yards

Suburbia is changing, too.

Established suburbs such as Virginia?s Fairfax County, outward Washington, D.C., are building city centers that mix residential and sell on greenfields. Rapid movementlines are expanding by Tysons Corner, site of dual selling malls and domicile of vital corporations. Plans are for dense, high-rise development.

Even normal communities built on greenfields are transforming. In Southern California?s Inland Empire, an area where housing prices are reduce and interest to first-time buyers, Brookfield is building Edenglen in Ontario. The homes are built on smaller lots ? 4,500 block feet instead of a some-more compulsory 7,200 block feet ? and labelled from $200,000 to $300,000.

?We?ve seen a lot of singular females, singular males, couples but kids,? says Carina Hathaway, clamp boss of marketing. ?They don?t unequivocally have time to say outrageous yards.?

But Kembel predicts infill expansion is a call of a future. Military bases that have shuttered offer outrageous opportunities, and so do aged subdivisions built when sprawling suburbia was innate in a 1950s and 1960s, he says.

?For a initial time in history, Americans have stopped pulling expansion to a edge,? says Robert Lang, highbrow of civic affairs during a University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of Megapolitan America. ?The change is from a aged crabgrass limit to a new Main Street.?

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Michelle Malkin ? Destroying private health insurance was always ...

Put on your shocked faces: The first Catholic college has announced it is dropping its student health insurance plan in the wake of the White House refusal to repeal the religious liberty-sabotaging Obamacare birth control/abortion mandate.

Life News has the scoop:

Franciscan University appears to be the first casualty of the new Obama HHS mandate that requires Catholic colleges, groups and businesses to pay for drugs that may cause abortions and birth control for their employees.

Although President Barack Obama declared ?If you like your health care coverage you can keep it,? when it came to passing Obamacare, a Catholic college in Ohio has determined it will no longer offer a student health insurance plan.

?The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover ?women?s health services? including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),? the university says in a new post on its website. ?Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.?

More from the school?s website:

Due to these changes in regulation by the federal government, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the University 1) will no longer require that all full-time undergraduate students carry health insurance, 2) will no longer offer a student health insurance plan, and 3) will no longer bill those not covered under a parent/guardian plan or personal plan for student health insurance. The current student health insurance plan will expire on August 15, 2012.

Destroying private health insurance was always the goal of health care ?reform?.

Always.

~ For the latest breaking news, be sure to join Michelle's e-mail list ~

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Sam Donaldson and skin cancer | InsuranceQuotes.com

Lori Johnston

For decades, Sam Donaldson reported the news as a correspondent for ABC. In 1995, however, he made news: The veteran journalist underwent surgery to treat melanoma, more commonly known as skin cancer.

In 2012 alone, more than 76,000 Americans will be diagnosed with melanoma, according to projections from the National Cancer Institute, and nearly 9,200 Americans who have the disease will die. Patients, health insurance companies and others spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to treat skin cancer.

sam_donaldsonThe 78-year-old Donaldson long ago recovered from melanoma. These days, he?s shedding light on the disease as an honorary member of the Melamona Research Center Advisory Board at Philadelphia?s The Wistar Institute.

Donaldson spoke with InsuranceQuotes.com about his bout with cancer and his support of melanoma research and funding.

InsuranceQuotes.com: When you learned you had cancer, you thought you were going to die and had three months to live. What would you tell people who have the same reaction when they learn they have skin cancer?

Sam Donaldson: Well, I?d say I didn?t know what I was talking about. I?m still kicking and had no recurrence. What I would say to people who have a bout of melanoma, whether it?s lesions or whether it?s lymph nodes involved, is it?s not a death sentence. You?re probably going to be all right.

InsuranceQuotes.com: How did your aggressive reporting style affect how you researched skin cancer and your medical options?

Donaldson: Once I discovered from a competent medical authority that I wasn?t going to necessarily die, the next day I delved into it. For instance, there?s a huge two-volume book (?Cancer: Principles & Practice of Oncology?) that oncologists use. I immediately went to that book at the time and I started reading the charts. I began to look into, ?What are?the possibilities, what are the treatments??

InsuranceQuotes.com: What were some of your options?

Donaldson: When I was diagnosed, one of the big problems was ?What do you do after they removed the lymph nodes and looked at the tissue, and pronounced the rest of it clean, and basically you went home??

Now, in those days, there was one FDA-approved therapy. Dr. John Kirkwood was using interferon. I called him up. He was very honest. He said it?s a yearlong treatment, so for the first month, you will feel like you had a bad flu, and for the rest of the time, you have less energy than you normally have and you won?t quite feel up to par. I said, ?Well, what does that do for me?? He said, ?According to our tests and our studies and our field trials that the FDA has looked at, we give you about a 26 percent chance ? of a one-year delay in the return of the disease and, therefore, a year of immortality.? So I?m thinking, ?Spend the year under the weather, not working so hard? get an extra year.? I don?t know if that?s a great tradeoff, so I didn?t do anything? (in terms of choosing treatment after the surgery, which removed the cancerous lymph nodes and tumor from his right groin).

InsuranceQuotes.com: Why is more funding needed for cancer treatment research and ultimately finding a cure?

Donaldson: At the moment, the National Institutes of Health can only fund 11 percent of peer-reviewed proposals. If one of those funded is the right one and can show that what worked in the rats works on us, then it?s great, but that?s not very good odds. What about the (remaining) 89 percent? Maybe one of them has the one that works on the rats, but we don?t know if it works on us because we don?t have enough money. To cut cancer research is stupid, but they?re trying to do it.

InsuranceQuotes.com: What are promising strides that you see?

Donaldson: There are new drugs that clearly are beneficial to cancer patients in many respects. However, immunotherapy ? the people who believe in that, and I happen to be one of them ? is seeing great strides already. Patients are responding. They?re getting up to a 70 percent response to melanoma tumors with new therapies. ? No one is yelling cure yet, but it is very, very promising.

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Zebrafish study isolates gene related to autism, schizophrenia and obesity

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

What can a fish tell us about human brain development? Researchers at Duke University Medical Center transplanted a set of human genes into a zebrafish and then used it to identify genes responsible for head size at birth.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center transplanted a set of human genes into a zebrafish and then used it to identify genes responsible for head size at birth.

Head size in human babies is a feature that is related to autism, a condition that recent figures have shown to be more common than previously reported, 1 in 88 children in a March 2012 study. Head size is also a feature of other major neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia.

"In medical research, we need to dissect events in biology so we can understand the precise mechanisms that give rise to neurodevelopmental traits," said senior author Nicholas Katsanis, Ph.D., Jean and George Brumley Jr., MD, Professor of Developmental Biology, and Professor of Pediatrics and Cell Biology. "We need expert scientists to work side by side with clinicians who see such anatomic and other problems in patients, if we are to effectively solve many of our medical problems."

The study was published online in Nature journal on May 16.

Katsanis knew that a region on chromosome 16 was one of the largest genetic contributors to autism and schizophrenia, but a conversation at a European medical meeting pointed him to information that changes within that same region of the genome also were related to changes in a newborn's head size.

The problem was difficult to address because the region had large deletions and duplications in DNA, which are the most common mutational mechanisms in humans. "Interpretation is harrowingly hard," said Katsanis, who is also director of the Duke Center for Human Disease Modeling.

The reason is that a duplication of DNA or missing DNA usually involves several genes. "It is very difficult to go from 'here is a region with many genes, sometimes over 50' to 'these are the genes that are driving this pathology,'" Katsanis said.

"There was a light bulb moment," Katsanis said. "The area of the genome we were exploring gave rise to reciprocal (opposite) defects in terms of brain cell growth, so we realized that overexpressing a gene in question might give one phenotype ? a smaller head, while shutting down the same gene might yield the other, a larger head."

The researchers transplanted a common duplication area of human chromosome 16 known to contain 29 genes into zebrafish embryos and then systematically turned up the activity of each transplanted human gene to find which might cause a small head (microcephaly) in the fish. They then suppressed the same gene set and asked whether any of them caused the reciprocal defect: larger heads (macrocephaly).

The researchers knew that deletion of the region that contained these 29 genes occurred in 1.7% of children with autism.

It took the team a few months to dissect such a "copy number variant" ? an alteration of the genome that results in an abnormal number of one or more sections of chromosomal DNA.

"Now we can go from a genetic finding that is dosage-sensitive and start asking reasonable questions about this gene as it pertains to neurocognitive traits, which is a big leap," Katsanis said. Neurocognitive refers to the ability to think, concentrate, reason, remember, process information, learn, understand and speak.

Many human conditions have anatomical features that are also related to genetics, he said. "There are major limitations in studying autistic or schizophrenic behavior in zebrafish, but we can measure head size, jaw size, or facial abnormalities."

The single gene in question, KCTD13, is responsible for driving head size in zebrafish by regulating the creation and destruction of new neurons (brain cells). This discovery let the team focus on the analogous gene in humans. "This gene contributes to autism cases, and probably is associated with schizophrenia and also childhood obesity," Katsanis said.

Once the gene has been uncovered, researchers can examine the protein it produces. "Once you have the protein, you can start asking valuable functional questions and learning what the gene does in the animal or human," Katsanis said.

Copy number variants, such as the ones this team found on chromosome 16, are now thought to be one of the most common sources of genetic mutations. Hundreds, if not thousands, of such chromosomal deletions and duplications have been found in patients with a broad range of clinical problems, particularly neurodevelopmental disorders.

"Now we may have an efficient tool for dissecting them, which gives us the ability to improve both diagnosis and understanding of disease mechanisms," Katsanis said.

The current study suggests that KCTD13 is a major contributor to some cases of autism, but also points to the synergistic action of this gene with two other genes in the region, named MVP and MAPK3, Katsanis said.

###

Duke University Medical Center: http://www.dukemednews.org

Thanks to Duke University Medical Center for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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lisasolod: @MJayRosenberg. There are lots of kids in my kids' generation who do like Israel, and are Jewish and leftwing.

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@MJayRosenberg. There are lots of kids in my kids' generation who do like Israel, and are Jewish and leftwing. lisasolod

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Phase 2 of Google vs. Oracle now in the hands of the jury

Last week, the California jury hearing the Oracle v. Google Java patent case could not come to a decision on the question of "Fair Use" of the patent and issued a split verdict. The suit is being heard in three phases and the next phase ended Tuesday when closing arguments were concluded. Now, this phase of the suit is in the hands of the jury which has started its deliberations. The second part of the suit dealt with patents. More specifically, it revolved around two remaining patents that Oracle accuses Google of infringing on with the Android OS.

The suit was filed by Oracle back in 2010 and alleges that Android infringes on some patents related to Java, the programming language acquired by Oracle when it purchased Sun Microsystem. Google responds that not only did it not infringe upon any Oracle patents, but that because Java is an open source system, parts of it cannot be patented.

Judge William Alsup told Oracle on Tuesday that he didn't believe that Oracle could prove that the infringement of code helped Google enough to warrant an order for Google to return some of its profits made using Android. The Judge claimed to be knowledgeable in computer programming and coding and said that the nine lines in rangeCheck copied in Android, would take 5 minutes to put together. Alsup characterized Oracle's desire for Google to disgorge profits as a? "fishing expedition." Oracle had until 9pm California time on Tuesday night to turn over to the court a detailed report on how the infringed code was a big part in Android's success. There is no word on whether or not the company met the deadline.

The next phase of the suit deals with damages and Google's Eric Schmidt and Larry Page are both on Oracle's witness list for the third and final phase of the trial which could start as soon as this week. Google attorney Daniel Purcell said it may be impossible and unnecessary to call the former and current CEO of the Mountain View based tech firm. But Judge Alsup warned Purcell that if the executives are subpoenaed, they need to show up.

The damages phase is going to be interesting as both sides are far apart. At one time, Oracle said it wanted $2 billion from Google for infringing on the patent. Google offered on March 29th to settle the case involving the two remaining patents for $2.8 million. In addition Google proposed a licensing fee of .5 percent of revenue until the patent expires in December, and .015 percent on a second patent until it expires in 2018. Oracle rejected the offers as it has been more concerned with defending its patents instead of receiving some cash.

source: electronista

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