Obama has two speeches ready, Romney only one (Washington Bureau)

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Cleveland BioLabs Announces Publication of Studies on Effect of ...

BUFFALO, N.Y., Nov. 6, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cleveland BioLabs, Inc. (Nasdaq:CBLI) announced today the online publication in the Journal of Immunology of a study demonstrating efficacy of Entolimod(TM) (previously known as CBLB502) in improving the graft-versus-tumor (GVT) activity of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (allo-BMT) in a mouse model. The reported studies were conducted by scientists at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) and Cleveland BioLabs.

Entolimod(TM) is a Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5) agonist currently under development as a radiation countermeasure. Allo-BMT is an established treatment for leukemia, lymphoma, and other hematologic and non-hematologic malignancies in which donor-derived immune cells (specifically, CD8+ T cells) identify and attack host tumor cells, producing a beneficial GVT effect.

The results of the study showed that Entolimod(TM) treatment significantly enhanced allogeneic CD8+ T cell-mediated GVT activity, as evidenced by decreased tumor burden and improved host survival. For example, 60% of mice that received Entolimod(TM) treatment in addition to allo-BMT were alive and tumor-free on Day 60 after lymphoma cell injection, while 100% of mice given allo-BMT alone were dead by Day 32 due to tumor outgrowth. Importantly, histopathology analyses on the subject mice showed that Entolimod(TM) treatment did not exacerbate graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) that often arises as a complication of allo-BMT due to the attack on healthy host tissues by transplanted donor cells.

The study also provided insight into the mechanism underlying Entolimod(TM)'s ability to enhance the GVT effect of allo-BMT. It was shown that Entolimod(TM) acts independently of the TLR5 status of the tumor through specific populations of hematopoietic cells in the bone marrow (CD11b+ dendritic cells and CD11c+ myeloid cells), which respond by secreting the cytokine IL-12. This cytokine then acts upon donor
CD8+ T cells, resulting in stimulation of their proliferation and
enhancement of their tumor-killing capacity.

Andrei Gudkov, Ph.D., D.Sci., Chief Scientific Officer of Cleveland BioLabs, Senior Vice President of Basic Science at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and co-author of the paper, commented: "This study extends potential therapeutic applications of Entolimod(TM) to include use in combination with allo-BMT to increase its anti-tumor efficacy without exacerbating GVHD. It also underscores the importance of mechanistic studies conducted as part of our radiation countermeasure program, which have helped us better understand Entolimod(TM)'s ability to promote beneficial immune responses that could impact a broad range of medical scenarios far beyond radiation protection/mitigation."

Annually, there are approximately 20,000 cases of allo-BMT worldwide and about 6,000 cases in the U.S., with roughly 35-50% of cases developing GVHD.

The Journal of Immunology publication may be found online at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23045613

About Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI)

The mission of Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) is to understand, prevent and cure cancer. RPCI, founded in 1898, was one of the first cancer centers in the country to be named a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center and remains the only facility with this designation in Upstate New York. The Institute is a member of the prestigious National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of the nation's leading cancer centers; maintains affiliate sites; and is a partner in national and international collaborative programs. For more information, visit RPCI's website at http://www.roswellpark.org, call 1-877-ASK-RPCI (1-877-275-7724) or email askrpci@roswellpark.org.

About Cleveland BioLabs, Inc.

Cleveland BioLabs, Inc. is a clinical-stage biotechnology company leveraging deep mechanistic understanding of the cell death process, apoptosis, to develop a robust pipeline of compounds primarily focused on oncology applications and mitigation of radiation injury. The Company's lead compound is being developed as both a radiation countermeasure and a cancer treatment. The Company has two operating subsidiaries, Incuron, LLC, and Panacela Labs, Inc., and strategic relationships with the Cleveland Clinic, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the Children's Cancer Institute Australia and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. To learn more about Cleveland BioLabs, Inc., please visit the Company's website at http://www.cbiolabs.com.

The Cleveland BioLabs, Inc. logo is available at
http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=11668

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Forward-looking statements reflect management's current expectations, as of the date of this press release, and involve certain risks and uncertainties. The Company's actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors.

These factors include, among others, the Company's history of operating losses and the potential for future losses, which may lead the Company to not be able to continue as a going concern; the Company's need for substantial additional financing to meet its business objectives; the potential for the loss of funding from the Company's R&D grants and contracts and its ability to win additional funding under such grants and contracts; the Company's failure to successfully and timely develop new products; the risks inherent in the early stages of drug development and in conducting clinical trials; the Company's inability to obtain regulatory approval in a timely manner or at all; the Company's collaborative relationships and the financial risks related thereto; the Company's ability to comply with its obligations under license agreements; the potential for significant product liability claims; and the Company's ability to comply with various safety, environmental and other governmental regulations. Some of these factors could cause future results to materially differ from the recent results or those projected in forward-looking statements. See also the "Risk Factors" and "Forward-Looking Statements" described in the Company's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

?

Posted: November 2012

Source: http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/cleveland-biolabs-announces-publication-studies-entolimod-cblb502-graft-versus-tumor-activity-14645.html

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American composer Elliott Carter dies at age 103

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Factbox: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden

(Reuters) - Joe Biden spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate, served four years as Barack Obama's vice president and twice ran unsuccessfully for president. His chatty, off-the-cuff nature led to some memorable gaffes.

Here are some key facts about Biden.

- Biden, 69, grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware, in a middle-class family. Occasional financial hardships while he was young gave him a good ear for the concerns of blue-collar workers. A football player in high school and at the University of Delaware, he overcame a stutter in his youth by reciting long passages of poetry before a mirror.

- He was only 29 when he won a U.S. Senate seat from Delaware in 1972, ousting an incumbent Republican to become the fifth youngest elected senator in U.S. history. His only political experience at the time was two years on a county council.

- A few weeks after the election, Biden's life was shattered when his wife, Neilia, and their three children were in a car wreck while shopping for a Christmas tree. Neilia and their year-old daughter were killed and their two sons were injured. The tragedy left Biden suicidal but he chose to go ahead with plans to serve in the Senate. Five years later he married Jill Jacobs, who he met on a blind date; they have one child.

- After his first wife's death, Biden chose not to move to Washington but instead made a 2 1/2-hour daily round-trip train commute from Delaware to his Senate job so he could spend more time with his sons. Biden said he made the trip more than 7,000 times and in 2011 the Amtrak station in Wilmington was renamed after him.

- While on the campaign trail in October, Biden made a reference to Americans having a chance to vote for him for president in 2016. It was unclear if he was serious and his campaign officials would not comment on the remark.

- His performance in his October 2012 vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan was notable for the way he smiled, chuckled and sometimes interrupted while the Republican nominee was speaking.

- He is known for his friendly but blunt and loquacious manner, which sometimes leads to embarrassing gaffes and contrasts with President Barack Obama's cautious manner. Biden was caught using the F-word on a live microphone during a White House ceremony with Obama and upstaged the president in 2012 by endorsing same-sex marriage before Obama did so.

- Biden has been troubled by two incidents involving plagiarism. In law school he was accused of plagiarizing a law review article, which he said was due to a mistaken citation. While running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987 he lifted parts of a speech by a British politician without attribution. Backlash from that incident led Biden to drop out of the presidential race the next month.

- Biden ran for president in 2008 and dropped out of the race early in the year - but not before making a verbal misstep involving his future boss. His description of Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" seemed to some to be condescending, with possible racial undertones.

- Biden was on the Foreign Relations Committee for his entire Senate tenure, sometimes serving as its chairman. He focused on Soviet relations, arms control, the Balkans and NATO expansion. He voted for the invasion of Iraq during the George W. Bush administration but later said he regretted it and spoke against the war.

- From being a rival in the nomination stakes, Biden has avoided the curse of vice presidential insignificance and become a close aide to Obama. He often takes the role of contrarian within the administration to ensure all views are being considered and spoke out against the U.S. special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 as being too risky.

- Biden is the first Roman Catholic vice president in U.S. history and his pro-choice position differs from the Vatican's abortion stand. Because of that, he came under fire from the bishop of his Wilmington diocese.

(Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/factbox-u-vice-president-joe-biden-050730323.html

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China's leadership shakeup: Am I an unfortunate casualty?

I've been trying ? and trying ? to reinstall software I need to freely access the Web in China. I increasingly suspect I'm doing battle with state-sponsored hackers ahead of the sensitive party congress.

By Peter Ford,?Staff writer / October 30, 2012

Take me back to the days of carrier pigeons and cleft sticks.

Skip to next paragraph Peter Ford

Beijing Bureau Chief

Peter Ford is The Christian Science Monitor?s Beijing Bureau Chief. He covers news and features throughout China and also makes reporting trips to Japan and the Korean peninsula.

Recent posts

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I have just spent an entire day wrestling with my computer and my Internet connection, and I have a strong suspicion that I have been wrestling too, at a distance, with an agent of the Chinese government who has been doing his or her best to frustrate me.

In order to access the Web freely from China, you need what is called a Virtual Private Network, which jumps the Great Firewall erected by Chinese censors. Mine expired the other day, so I needed to re-install it.?

That proved unusually difficult, even with online help from the company selling me the VPN, and it became clear that something was just not right.

My suspicions were heightened by the fact that I, like many other journalists, have recently received emails with Trojan horse malware (malicious code that looks like a legitimate file but in fact gives a hacker access to a computer) in their attachments. Cyber analysts who inspected them have warned that the attachments appear to come from state-sponsored hackers.?

Google has also informed me in a banner appearing on my Gmail account that it suspects "state-sponsored" hackers have been trying to penetrate my account.?

The last time this happened to me was during the Tibetan riots in 2008, when the authorities were very, very nervous about foreign journalists and began interfering directly with our communications. (That is over and above the normal surveillance to which our emails and phone calls are subject.)

Today we are at another highly sensitive political juncture, 10 days away from the 18th?congress of the ruling Communist Party, which is due to anoint a new generation of leaders. But there are signs of a continuing power struggle at the very top of the party, suggesting that the government system is a good deal less stable than Beijing would like us to believe.

There came a moment this afternoon, when the VPN would not install, when a Microsoft update would not install, and when a virus detector would not install, that I came to believe I was in direct contact with my persecutor.

I was on the ?Sophos? virus detector?s webpage, seeking to download the tool. Each time I clicked on ?download,? I got the standard message when the censors have banned a site: ?Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.? But the page itself was not blocked and after a few tries I found I was being cut off even before my cursor reached the ?download? button.

It was just as if somebody was watching my screen and interrupting me as I was on the point of doing what I wanted to.

I have no idea how possible this is, but tend to take the advice of my Chinese assistant. ?There is nothing a hacker cannot do,? she has decided. ?Why don?t you try again when ?they? have gone off duty??

So I?ll be back in the office at midnight, and hope that ?they? do not work 24/7?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/UwDJq_5TNLc/China-s-leadership-shakeup-Am-I-an-unfortunate-casualty

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Each Ohio Voter Has a 1 in a Million Chance of Deciding the Election

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'China investing too much in politics?' | Firstpost

Tianjin:? Dong Zizhou casts his fishing net from the shore and fixes his gaze on a stand of 15 unfinished skyscrapers rising like concrete skeletons beside the Hai River, heralding China?s ambition to develop the world?s largest financial centre.

The towers in Tianjin?s Yujiapu Financial District, and two dozen others on the opposite side of the river, are monuments to the transformation of this once-rundown northern city of 13 million into the country?s fastest growing region last year.

They are also a testament to Tianjin?s political boss, Zhang Gaoli, whose economic record has marked him out as a rising star of China?s communist leadership, a leading candidate to join its supreme decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee.

AFP.

But locals such as Dong, whose house was torn down to make way for the towers, have doubts that the vast sums of money being pumped into the project have been well spent.

?I look at this and it seems like the country is investing too much,? Dong, a 62-year-old retired electrician, said as he used a winch to lower a wide, hooped net into the river?s grey waters. ?Everyone has a loan these days. But average people, we don?t understand where this money comes from.?

Many experts share Dong?s scepticism.

For some of them, Zhang?s investment drive in Tianjin is as much a political statement as an economic one?an example of the monumental cost of forging a political career in a one-party state where economic growth, not votes, is a measure of success.

In the past three years alone, the government has poured more than $160 billion into the development zone housing Yujiapu, almost three times the amount spent on China?s Three Gorges Dam, one of the nation?s most expensive projects.

Yujiapu, billed as China?s Manhattan, helped Tianjin to record 16.4 percent growth in 2011, part of a successful tenure in the city that could see Zhang join the Standing Committee this month in once-in-a-decade transition.

?Zhang Gaoli, compared to his predecessors in Tianjin, is a relatively capable guy. And one way in which he is very capable is in getting money from the central government for big projects,? said Zhang Wei, a Hong Kong-based economist and former Tianjin official.

But critics of Zhang Gaoli see Tianjin as typical of the kind of debt-financed infrastructure splurges that have succeeded in getting politicians noticed inside China?s ruling Communist Party but have left behind mixed economic blessings.

They say Zhang, Tianjin party chief since 2007, has employed cheap state capital and high levels of debt to fund his goal of turning the port city into a global financial centre.

?The Achilles heel of the Chinese economy is free capital,? said Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. ?Here you have a group of people who are making very big bets and they don?t have any skin in the game.?

?Getting a mega-project attracts attention,? Pei added.

However, other China experts applaud Zhang?s economic vision, and suggest that political recognition of his efforts through promotion would not be misplaced.

?Things have changed so much since Zhang Gaoli came to the city. There is no doubt he has been a very significant player,? said Dali Yang, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. ?What we?re talking about is really a kind of municipal entrepreneurship. Cities like Chicago and New York would not have been built without this.?

For some economists, though, Tianjin is emblematic of China?s over-reliance on investment to fuel growth.

Government data shows fixed-asset investment in the city accelerated at around the time Zhang took the reins, as it had done in eastern Shandong province from 2002 when he had taken over as party boss there.

Plans for Tianjin?s Binhai New Area ? the development zone encompassing Yujiapu?were on the books for years before Zhang arrived, but his reign has seen remarkable investment outlays.

In 2010, Tianjin ranked second among Chinese cities for fixed-asset investment with 651 billion yuan, just below southwestern Chongqing, which has nearly three times the population and its own bold infrastructure plans.

Chongqing?s ex-party boss, Bo Xilai, had used the sprawling boomtown, which matched Tianjin?s racy GDP growth rate in 2011, as a springboard in his bid to join the Standing Committee. Those ambitions were shattered this year in a string of dramatic scandals that saw Bo ejected from the party, accused of a litany of crimes and his wife convicted of murdering a British businessman.

After the scandals surfaced, Chongqing?s finances came under the microscope. The municipality?s latest available records, for 2010, show that 12 of its largest investment vehicles had racked up 363 billion yuan in debt, though analysts expect actual liabilities could be several times higher.

Unlike Bo, Zhang has avoided political theatrics throughout his career, kept his head down, crafted important allegiances and logged strong economic growth figures as he moved between top regional party posts over the past 15 years.

His climb has been quick but relatively inconspicuous ? with the exception of his Tianjin investment drive, which is remarkable even by the standards of a nation that for nearly a decade has relied on investment for about half of its growth.

China?s state audit office put total local government debt across the country at 10.7 trillion yuan as of end-2010, though rating agencies have said those numbers could under-report actual debt levels by as much as 3.5 trillion yuan.

Mao Yushi, a prominent Chinese economist who advocates for reform, worries that Tianjin?s boom may end in a bust.

?GDP growth is one way of showing a record of achievement,? said Mao, referring to party officials across China. ?Another is through the construction of massive buildings, so-called image projects.? However, he added: ?These create a fuse for a future financial crisis.?

Plans for Tianjin call for a high-speed rail link to open in 2014, connecting the downtown area with Yujiapu nearly 50 km (30 miles) away, a distance that adds to concerns that the bold new financial hub could quickly become a glut of office space.

On the existing light rail, it takes an hour to cross the expanse of warehouses and urban sprawl, dotted with hand-picked cotton fields and hundreds of half-built residential towers.

?They (Tianjin officials) are hoping they will kick-start the market. If they get state-owned enterprises there, they may be okay. If they don?t, they will be in trouble,? said Michael Hart, managing director for commercial real estate at the Tianjin office of property consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle.

Tianjin is now planning for three financial services zones: one in the city?s downtown, another at Yujiapu and a third just kilometres away from Yujiapu in what is called TEDA (the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area).

TEDA is putting the finishing touches on a development of office parks that, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, will have more office space than all of downtown Tianjin offers now. That will be followed in 2014 by the initial crop of 15 towers in Yujiapu, and another 1 million square meters of office space.

Binhai government officials did not respond to an interview request, and TEDA representatives declined to answer questions.

Cranes above Yujiapu were idle when Reuters visited last month and the construction site was quiet, with only occasional cement mixers driving the muddy alleys between the towers.

Tractor driver Zhao Wenxi, 47, said some buildings had not been worked on in months. ?It seems their funds aren?t stable,? he said, adding however that he wasn?t worried about his job.

?The central government is behind this project.?

Pei, the professor at Claremont McKenna College, said a record of strong GDP growth was required for promotion but that other factors, such as political affiliation, loomed larger as politicians reached the top rungs of power.

?You must put an asterisk next to it. If you have a powerful patron, poor performance will not be a hindrance,? Pei said.

For example, experts say leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping could not have soared so high without wide factional support. But Xi?s earlier career is paved with growth, having spent two decades in the booming eastern regions of Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai.

Research also suggests a stronger link between GDP growth and official promotion at provincial levels than elite levels.

Though a recent study published by the American Political Science Review challenged the link between growth and promotion, especially for elite leaders, it also found that tax revenues were a major indicator of advancement at lower rungs of power.

For Zhang Wei, the Hong Kong-based economist, this link between tax revenues and promotion actually suggests that GDP growth does indeed play a significant role in promotion.

?Where does that money come from? It comes from tax. Where does tax come from? GDP growth,? he said.

Reuters

Source: http://www.firstpost.com/world/china-investing-too-much-in-politics-514497.html

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