HIGH blood pressure is an ominous threat because it marks the first stage in a sequence of events that could lead to cardiovascular complications. To ward off the threat, it is important to start your day with a cereal that keeps your reading in check.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) recently published new preliminary figures for aid in 2013.

It showed official development assistance (ODA) aid from wealthy governments had increased to just under $135 billion in 2013 (at constant 2012 prices). This is roughly 0.3% of GNI (Gross National Income) of the donor nations.

Yet, over 40 years ago nations promised to reach 0.7% of their GNI by the mid-1970s. While each year the amount of aid falls quite short of that 0.7% target (less than half of that target), the quality and effectiveness of that aid is often questionable, sometimes benefiting the donor more than the recipient due to the types of conditions attached to this aid.

This update includes a number of new and updated charts and graphs.

Read full article: Foreign Aid for Development Assistance

Manchester City beat Sheffield Wednesday 1-0 in the FA Cup clash at Hillsborough, as Pep Guardiola's side progress to the quarter-finals, just in time for the FA Cup draw. Express Sport is on hand to bring you all of the Citizens' player ratings after a tough evening against the Championship club.

CELTIC will need to up their offer to David Turnbull if they want to salvage his £3million transfer.

Steven Gerrard believes Ryan Kent will get even better for Rangers as he’s not even fully fit yet.

ALFREDO MORELOS powered Rangers to victory with a second half double to keep the pressure on Celtic.

NASA'S Perseverance rover is taking shape at the Kennedy Space Center as its summer launch date creeps closer.

THE wards are almost deserted. Few patients fill the beds. But this is not a story of institutional failure. On the contrary, the emptiness of the vast temporary Nightingale hospital in London is a shining tribute to how well the NHS has handled the coronavirus pandemic.

ON MAY 7, 1945, General Alfred Jodl, the commander of German forces in western Europe, walked into a technical college in the city of Reims which served as General Eisenhower's HQ in France.

Look to those that survived the Depression for survival tips.

Passagem da Terra pela trilha de resquícios do cometa Halley traz espetáculo de chuva de meteoros todos os anos; países da América do Sul estão entre os melhores posicionados para assistir a esse show noturno.

Kevin Peoples has been mentored by Pete Jenkins, a defensive line master for decades.

  OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR Governor Kim Reynolds « Lt. Governor Adam Gregg FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, June 21, 2017 CONTACT: Brenna Smith, (515) 281-5211 Gov. Reynolds sets Iowa House District 82 special election for August 8 (DES MOINES) – Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a proclamation Wednesday setting the date […]

Kevin Peoples has been mentored by Pete Jenkins, a defensive line master for decades.

Kevin Peoples has been mentored by Pete Jenkins, a defensive line master for decades.

The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent in April, the highest level since the Great Depression, as many businesses shut down or severely curtailed operations to try and limit the spread of the deadly coronavirus. From a report: The Labor Department said 20.5 million people abruptly lost their jobs, wiping out a decade of employment gains in a single month. The speed and magnitude of the loss defies comparison. It is roughly double what the nation experienced during the entire 2007-09 crisis. As the virus's rapid spread accelerated in March, President Trump and numerous governors imposed restrictions that led businesses to suddenly shed millions of workers, putting the economy in a deep freeze. Analysts warn it could take many years to return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate the nation experienced in February in part because it's unclear what a new economy will look like even if scientists make progress on a vaccine, testing, and treatment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lawrence North, Silver Creek, Fort Wayne Blackhawk, Greenwood Christian on top of my ballot this week

Shenandoah moves up to No. 1 in Class 2A and Greenwood Christian No. 1 in Class A

Bloomington South No. 1 on my Class 4A ballot this week

Bloomington South, Silver Creek, Shenandoah, Greenwood Christian are No. 1 teams this week

Bloomington South, Lawrence North, Lawrence Central top three on my Class 4A ballot this week

Linton-Stockton new No. 1 this week in Class 2A

Bloomington South, Silver Creek, Fort Wayne Blackhawk, Greenwood Christian on top of my ballot

Bloomington South, Silver Creek, Shenandoah, Greenwood Christian on top of polls this week

Bloomington South, Silver Creek, Fort Wayne Blackhawk, Barr-Reeve No. 1 teams on my ballot for this week

Bloomington South, Silver Creek, Shenandoah and Barr-Reeve ranked No. 1 this week

IHSAA basketball: IndyStar's high school insider Kyle Neddenriep ranks boys basketball teams statewide.

Bloomington South, Silver Creek, Shenandoah, Barr-Reeve are No. 1 teams going into tournament

The startup anti-patterns section of my blog summarizes the repeatable ways startups waste time & money and, often, fail. Learning from startup failure is valuable because there are many more examples of failures that successes. (Anti-)Patterns become more noticeable and … Continue reading →

England bowler Jofra Archer impresses with a 4-1 win over Newcastle's Rolando Aarons in the best of the action from the first day of the second Premier League Fifa invitational.

Kevin Peoples has been mentored by Pete Jenkins, a defensive line master for decades.

England's new coach will not have a honeymoon period

Known as “My Special Aflac Duck,” the robot is merging play with tools that help doctors do their jobs.

• Facebook is taking a harder line on misinformation related to coronavirus than it has on other health topics in the past.
• This decision may increase the pressure on the company to act more decisively against other forms of harmful falsehoods that spread on its social networks.
• Facebook is banning events that promote flouting lockdown protests, and is removing the conspiracy theory video "Plandemic."
• But false claims that vaccines are dangerous still proliferate on Facebook — even though they contribute to the deaths of children.

Amid the pandemic, Facebook is taking a harder line on misinformation than it has in the past. That decision may come back to haunt it.

As coronavirus has wreaked havoc across the globe, forcing lockdowns and disrupting economies, false information and hoaxes have spread like wildfire on social media. Miracle cures, intentional disinformation about government policies, and wild claims that Bill Gates orchestrated the entire health crisis abound.

In the past, Facebook has been heavily criticised for failing to take action to stop its platform being used to facilitate the spread of misinformation. To be sure, coronavirus falsehoods are still easily found on Facebook — but the company has taken more decisive action than in previous years:

• For starters, Facebook is now displaying warning messages to people who have shared false information about COVID-19. They're imperfect — Stat reported that they may be too vague in their wording to have a major impact — but it's a step further than Facebook has taken on misinformation in the past.
• The company is also taking down event pages for events that reject mainstream science on coronavirus by calling on people to flout lockdown rules.
• And it is banning "Plandemic," a conspiratorial video about coronavirus that has been going viral on social media and contains numerous falsehoods.

But Facebook's actions to combat COVID-19 misinformation may backfire — in the sense that it has the potential to dramatically increase pressure on the company to take stronger action against other forms of misinformation.

The company has long struggled with how to handle fake news and hoaxes; historically, its approach is not to delete them, but to try to artificially stifle their reach via algorithmic tweaks. Despite this, pseudoscience, anti-government conspiracy theories, and other falsehoods still abound on the social network.

Facebook has now demonstrated that it is willing to take more decisive action on misinformation, when the stakes are high enough. Its critics may subsequently ask why it is so reticent to combat the issue when it causes harm in other areas — particularly around other medical misinformation.

One expected defence for Facebook? That it is focused on taking down content that causes "imminent harm," and while COVID-19 misinformation falls into that category, lots of other sorts of falsehoods don't.

However, using "imminence" as the barometer of acceptability is dubious: Vaccine denialism directly results in the deaths of babies and children. That this harm isn't "imminent" doesn't make it any less dangerous — but, for now, such material is freely posted on Facebook.

Far-right conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, and more recent, Qanon, have also spread on Facebook — stoking baseless fears of shadowy cabals secretly controlling the government. These theories don't intrinsically incite harm, but have been linked to multiple acts of violence, from a Pizzagate believer firing his weapon in a pizza parlour to the Qanon-linked killing of a Gambino crime boss. (Earlier this week, Facebook did take down some popular QAnon pages — but for breaking its rules on fake profiles, rather than disinformation.)

And Facebook is still full of groups rallying against 5G technology, making evidence-free claims about its health effects (and now, sometimes linking it to coronavirus in a messy web). These posts exist on a continuum, with believers at the extreme end attempting to burn down radio towers and assault technicians; Facebook does take down such incitements to violence, but the more general fearmongering that can act as a gateway to more extreme action remains.

This week, Facebook announced the first 20 members of its Oversight Board — a "Supreme Court"-style entity that will review reports from users make rulings as to what objectionable content is and isn't allowed on Facebook and Instagram, with — in theory — the power to overrule the company. It remains to be seen whether its decisions may affect the company's approach for misinformation, and it still needs to appoint the rest of its members and get up and running.

For now, limits remain in place as to what Facebook will countenance in its fight against coronavirus-specific misinformation.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would immediately take down posts advertising dangerous false cures to COVID-19, like drinking bleach. It is "obviously going to create imminent harm," he said in March. "That is just in a completely different class of content than the back-and-forth accusations a candidate might make in an election."

But in April, President Donald Trump suggested that people might try injecting a "disinfectant" as a cure, which both has the potential to be extremely harmful, and will not cure coronavirus.

Facebook is not taking down video of his comments.

Do you work at Facebook? Contact Business Insider reporter Rob Price via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (robaeprice@protonmail.com), standard email (rprice@businessinsider.com), Telegram/Wickr/WeChat (robaeprice), or Twitter DM (@robaeprice). We can keep sources anonymous. Use a non-work device to reach out. PR pitches by standard email only, please.

SEE ALSO: Facebook announced the first 20 members of its oversight board that will decide what controversial content is allowed on Facebook and Instagram

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A cleaning expert reveals her 3-step method for cleaning your entire home quickly

The "Saturday Night Live" star debuted a brief impression on "Late Night with Seth Meyers."

What is a Cron Job? Cron Jobs are basically scheduled tasks that are created automatically by WordPress or a WordPress Plugin that you have activated on your website. They are similar to an alarm clock that goes off regularly to trigger an automative response. Before we delve into explaining how you can view and control […]

The post How to View and Control WordPress Cron Jobs appeared first on Tips and Tricks HQ.

If you intend on offering downloadable content from your WordPress website, using the Simple Download Monitor Plugin will allow you to do so. Furthermore, if you wish to collect say your user’s name and email address in a neat and tidy popup window before the download commences, then the Squeeze Form Addon can be used. […]

The post Create a Squeeze Form in a Popup for WordPress appeared first on Tips and Tricks HQ.

They know more than anyone how difficult it is to get funding for colleges.

Yesterday was a really fun day spent at Nokia World, the Finnish handset maker’s annual shindig. Conveniently, this year it was held in my home city of London and I got to cover the event for TechCrunch Europe. On day one, Nokia unveiled three new smartphones running Symbian^3, the C6, C7 and E7, which I [...]

So it is difficult to imagine who would want to stop the SARB if it would help reduce load shedding and contain further job losses.A similar argument arises in providing social houses to replace our dangerous rusty corrugated iron suburbs.

Newly appointed White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany continues to impress in her new position working for the White House. Two days after absolutely leveling members of the White House media corps, the 32-year-old former Trump campaign spokeswoman made waves Friday by warning Americans that they, like former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, could also…

The post New White House Press Sec Issues Dire Warning to Americans About the FBI appeared first on The Western Journal.

The following article, BREAKING: Vice President Mike Pence’s Press Sec Katie Miller, Wife of President Trump’s Sr. Advisor, Stephen Miller, Tests Positive For COVID-19, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Only moments ago, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany confirmed that a member of Vice President Mike Pence’s team tested positive for coronavirus. Watch: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany confirms a member of Vice President Mike Pence's team tested positive for coronavirus pic.twitter.com/3VaUXbwMq7 — Bloomberg QuickTake (@QuickTake) May 8, 2020 Reuters White House Correspondent […]

Continue reading: BREAKING: Vice President Mike Pence’s Press Sec Katie Miller, Wife of President Trump’s Sr. Advisor, Stephen Miller, Tests Positive For COVID-19 ...

Previous studies have shown that sphingosine kinase interacting protein (SKIP) inhibits sphingosine kinase (SK) function in fibroblasts. SK phosphorylates sphingosine producing the potent signaling molecule sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P). SKIP gene (SPHKAP) expression is silenced by hypermethylation of its promoter in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). However, why SKIP activity is silenced in primary AML cells is unclear. Here, we investigated the consequences of SKIP down-regulation in AML primary cells and the effects of SKIP re-expression in leukemic cell lines. Using targeted ultra-HPLC-tandem MS (UPLC-MS/MS), we measured sphingolipids (including S1P and ceramides) in AML and control cells. Primary AML cells had significantly lower SK activity and intracellular S1P concentrations than control cells, and SKIP-transfected leukemia cell lines exhibited increased SK activity. These findings show that SKIP re-expression enhances SK activity in leukemia cells. Furthermore, other bioactive sphingolipids such as ceramide were also down-regulated in primary AML cells. Of note, SKIP re-expression in leukemia cells increased ceramide levels 2-fold, inactivated the key signaling protein extracellular signal-regulated kinase, and increased apoptosis following serum deprivation or chemotherapy. These results indicate that SKIP down-regulation in AML reduces SK activity and ceramide levels, an effect that ultimately inhibits apoptosis in leukemia cells. The findings of our study contrast with previous results indicating that SKIP inhibits SK function in fibroblasts and therefore challenge the notion that SKIP always inhibits SK activity.

Prostate cancer (PCa) cells heavily rely on an active androgen receptor (AR) pathway for their survival. Enzalutamide (MDV3100) is a second-generation antiandrogenic drug that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2012 to treat patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). However, emergence of resistance against this drug is inevitable, and it has been a major challenge to develop interventions that help manage enzalutamide-resistant CRPC. Erythropoietin-producing human hepatocellular (Eph) receptors are targeted by ephrin protein ligands and have a broad range of functions. Increasing evidence indicates that this signaling pathway plays an important role in tumorigenesis. Overexpression of EPH receptor B4 (EPHB4) has been observed in multiple types of cancer, being closely associated with proliferation, invasion, and metastasis of tumors. Here, using RNA-Seq analyses of clinical and preclinical samples, along with several biochemical and molecular methods, we report that enzalutamide-resistant PCa requires an active EPHB4 pathway that supports drug resistance of this tumor type. Using a small kinase inhibitor and RNAi-based gene silencing to disrupt EPHB4 activity, we found that these disruptions re-sensitize enzalutamide-resistant PCa to the drug both in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, we found that EPHB4 stimulates the AR by inducing proto-oncogene c-Myc (c-Myc) expression. Taken together, these results provide critical insight into the mechanism of enzalutamide resistance in PCa, potentially offering a therapeutic avenue for enhancing the efficacy of enzalutamide to better manage this common malignancy.

Chatham House has signed an agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP) to publish International Affairs from 2017.

Invitation Only

Event participants

Robin Niblett, Director, Chatham House; Chair, NATO Group of Policy Experts
Xenia Wickett, Project Director, US; Acting Dean, Academy for Leadership in International Affairs, Chatham House

Chair
Paola Totaro, President, Foreign Press Association

pncRNA-D is an irradiation-induced 602-nt long noncoding RNA transcribed from the promoter region of the cyclin D1 (CCND1) gene. CCND1 expression is predicted to be inhibited through an interplay between pncRNA-D and RNA-binding protein TLS/FUS. Because the pncRNA-D–TLS interaction is essential for pncRNA-D–stimulated CCND1 inhibition, here we studied the possible role of RNA modification in this interaction in HeLa cells. We found that osmotic stress induces pncRNA-D by recruiting RNA polymerase II to its promoter. pncRNA-D was highly m6A-methylated in control cells, but osmotic stress reduced the methylation and also arginine methylation of TLS in the nucleus. Knockdown of the m6A modification enzyme methyltransferase-like 3 (METTL3) prolonged the half-life of pncRNA-D, and among the known m6A recognition proteins, YTH domain-containing 1 (YTHDC1) was responsible for binding m6A of pncRNA-D. Knockdown of METTL3 or YTHDC1 also enhanced the interaction of pncRNA-D with TLS, and results from RNA pulldown assays implicated YTHDC1 in the inhibitory effect on the TLS–pncRNA-D interaction. CRISPR/Cas9-mediated deletion of candidate m6A site decreased the m6A level in pncRNA-D and altered its interaction with the RNA-binding proteins. Of note, a reduction in the m6A modification arrested the cell cycle at the G0/G1 phase, and pncRNA-D knockdown partially reversed this arrest. Moreover, pncRNA-D induction in HeLa cells significantly suppressed cell growth. Collectively, these findings suggest that m6A modification of the long noncoding RNA pncRNA-D plays a role in the regulation of CCND1 gene expression and cell cycle progression.

Bacterial products such as lipopolysaccharides (or endotoxin) cause systemic inflammation, resulting in a substantial global health burden. The onset, progression, and resolution of the inflammatory response to endotoxin are usually tightly controlled to avoid chronic inflammation. Members of the NF-κB family of transcription factors are key drivers of inflammation that activate sets of genes in response to inflammatory signals. Such responses are typically short-lived and can be suppressed by proteins that act post-translationally, such as the SOCS (suppressor of cytokine signaling) family. Less is known about direct transcriptional regulation of these responses, however. Here, using a combination of in vitro approaches and in vivo animal models, we show that endotoxin treatment induced expression of the well-characterized transcriptional repressor Krüppel-like factor 3 (KLF3), which, in turn, directly repressed the expression of the NF-κB family member RELA/p65. We also observed that KLF3-deficient mice were hypersensitive to endotoxin and exhibited elevated levels of circulating Ly6C+ monocytes and macrophage-derived inflammatory cytokines. These findings reveal that KLF3 is a fundamental suppressor that operates as a feedback inhibitor of RELA/p65 and may be important in facilitating the resolution of inflammation.

The arrangement of functionally-related genes in operons is a fundamental element of how genetic information is organized in prokaryotes. This organization ensures coordinated gene expression by co-transcription. Often, however, alternative genetic responses to specific stress conditions demand the discoordination of operon expression. During cold temperature stress, accumulation of the gene encoding the sole Asp–Glu–Ala–Asp (DEAD)-box RNA helicase in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, crhR (slr0083), increases 15-fold. Here, we show that crhR is expressed from a dicistronic operon with the methylthiotransferase rimO/miaB (slr0082) gene, followed by rapid processing of the operon transcript into two monocistronic mRNAs. This cleavage event is required for and results in destabilization of the rimO transcript. Results from secondary structure modeling and analysis of RNase E cleavage of the rimO–crhR transcript in vitro suggested that CrhR plays a role in enhancing the rate of the processing in an auto-regulatory manner. Moreover, two putative small RNAs are generated from additional processing, degradation, or both of the rimO transcript. These results suggest a role for the bacterial RNA helicase CrhR in RNase E-dependent mRNA processing in Synechocystis and expand the known range of organisms possessing small RNAs derived from processing of mRNA transcripts.