Troy Bayliss yesterday celebrated his 38th birthday by setting the fastest time in qualifying for the European round of the World Superbike Championship on a slippery and dangerous Donington Park, while Britain’s James Toseland settled for a prudent fourth best, 1.359sec behind.

“The track had a dry line only two feet wide, but the times were good and I’m feeling confident,” Bayliss said after climbing from his Xerox Ducati.

The Australian reigning champion also dismissed suggestions that his twin-cylinder bike lacks power compared to Toseland’s four-cylinder Hannspree Ten Kate Honda. “You have to have power in any bike, but the fastest motorcycle will not necessarily win here this weekend,” Bayliss said.

Toseland’s rivals will try to cut into the 16-point lead that the 26-year-old Briton has built up in the first two rounds of the championship when riders compete in tomorrow’s two 23-lap races. They will also do their upmost to upstage him in the battle for grid positions during the Superpole qualifying contest today.

“I’ve had seasons when I’ve been strong in the first half, but things have started to go wrong later on,” Troy Corser warned after finishing second fastest on his Yamaha YZF-R1.

Toseland has finished first or second in each of the four races held so far this year, but British fans heading for the 2.5-mile Leicestershire circuit should not assume that he will again top the podium. He has not ridden here since 2001, and yesterday’s difficult conditions will not have helped him to perfect his bike’s set-up for the drier and warmer conditions expected tomorrow.

“Donington could be one of the hardest races of the year for James because of his lack of experience on the track,” his manager, Roger Burnett, said. “On the other hand, no one’s had the chance to test here, and we have a reasonably unfickle bike.”

In his six-year superbike career Toseland has won only once on home shores, but he may prefer to score a solid points tally at Donington rather than risk all in desperate lunges for the front.

The superbike series was born at the circuit 20 years ago, but two other rounds of the championship will be held in Britain this year, at Silverstone in May and Brands Hatch in August, on circuits that he knows better.

“The new package we have on the bike is giving me a lot of confidence even in these conditions,” Toseland said. “We’ve got plenty of tyres for the weekend so hopefully we can get the best out of them and I can concentrate on winning.”

April 20, 2007 — Rescuers blasted through a wall and were removing tons of debris yesterday to find two miners trapped under at least 45 feet of rock and mud at a surface coal mine in western Maryland.

Parts of the wall collapsed onto operators of a mechanical shovel and bulldozer Tuesday at the Job No. 3 Mine in Garrett County, Maryland, owned by Tri-Star Mining Inc.

There has been no contact with the miners, whose names have not been released, since the wall collapse, according to a statement from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Copyright 2007 Reuters. Click For Restrictions

SAN JOSE - Intel Corp. plans to spend between $1 billion and $1.5 billion to overhaul its semiconductor production facility in New Mexico to manufacture computer chips with next-generation technology.

The Rio Rancho factory is expected to begin producing 45-nanometer chips meaning they will have features as tiny as 45-billionths of a meter in the second half of 2008, Intel said Monday. The transistors on such chips are so small that more than 30 million can fit onto the head of a pin.

Shrinking the circuitry of microprocessors, which act as the core calculating engines of computers, is essential to keeping up rapid gains in performance and energy efficiency.

Smaller chips let companies cram more transistors onto each slice of silicon and maintain the pace of Moores Law, the 1965 prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip should double about every two years.

Intel expects the Rio Rancho investment to further its lead over rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Both companies are transitioning from the 65-nanometer technology used for their most advanced chips.

Intel said it remains on track to begin production based on 45-nanometer technology in the second half of this year, while AMD has said it plans to introduce its own 45-nanometer products in mid-2008.

In addition to its plans for Rio Rancho, Intel is spending $3 billion on a factory in Arizona and $3.5 billion on a facility in Israel, both of which will handle the new technology.

Intel said last month that chips based on 45-nanometer technology will use new materials that promise to reduce energy loss and solve a major problem vexing the semiconductor industry. The materials replace vital but problematic substances that had begun leaking too much electric current.

In a dueling announcement the same day, International Business Machines Corp. also said it plans to begin using the same materials in server chips in 2008. AMD helped IBM develop the technology, though it was unclear when AMD would begin using the materials in its own products.

Intels shares rose 9 cents to close at $20.85 on the Nasdaq Stock Market after the investment was announced.
2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The number of children in the USA who are having obesity surgery has tripled in recent years, surging at a pace that could mean more than 1,000 such operations this year, new research suggests.

Though the procedure is still far more common in adults, it appears to be slightly less risky in teens, at least in the short term, according to an analysis of data on 12- to 19-year-olds who had obesity surgery from 1996 through 2003.

In that period, an estimated 2,744 youngsters had the operations. The pace tripled from 2000 to 2003 and reached 771 surgeries that year, the study found.

Youngsters had slightly shorter hospital stays than adults, and none died in the hospital in the study period. By contrast, there were 212 in-hospital deaths of an estimated 104,702 adults who had obesity surgery in 2003, or a rate of 0.2%, the study found.

Researchers at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center analyzed a database of U.S. hospital patients. Obesity surgeries in children during the eight-year period and adults in 2003 were included in the analysis. The study appears in Monday’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The youngest patients were 12, but most were older teens. In 2003, Eric Decker, who says he was 5-foot-8 and 385 pounds at age 17, had gastric bypass surgery, the most common obesity operation in teens and adults. Obesity surgery was a last resort, and doctors say it should be for overweight teens. Decker had no major complications. A year and a half later, he was 185 pounds and says he has stayed there with diet and exercise.

“It’s definitely a painful surgery,” says Decker, a student at the University of South Carolina. It also requires drastic changes in eating habits, he says.

Study co-author Thomas Inge attributes the surge in teen operations to publicity about celebrities who have had obesity surgery, including pop singer Carnie Wilson and broadcaster Al Roker.

The numbers contrast with an estimate in January from the Agency for health care Research and Quality, which reported that 349 youngsters ages 12 to 17 had obesity surgery in 2004.

The new study included children up to age 19, which accounts for the higher number, says lead author Randall Burd of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Last year, there were an estimated 177,600 obesity surgeries, according to the American Society for Bariatric Surgery, up from 20,500 a decade ago and 103,200 in 2003. The group doesn’t have a breakdown on the number of pediatric operations. If it has kept pace with adults, the number of obesity surgeries in teens likely would climb well past 1,000 this year.

Inge, of Cincinnati Children’s, said the new study suggests risks outweigh benefits for most patients. But it left many unanswered questions, including how teens fared after leaving the hospital.

The rates of drug-resistant gonorrhea in the United States have increased so greatly in the last five years that doctors should now treat the infection with a different class of antibiotics, the last line of defense for the sexually transmitted disease, officials said Thursday.

The percentage of drug-resistant gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men jumped, to 6.7 percent in 2006 compared with 0.6 percent in 2001, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Standard monitoring of gonorrhea cases is conducted among men who go to S.T.D. clinics. New data from such sites in 26 cities show that rates of drug-resistant gonorrhea among heterosexual men at the clinics last year reached 26 percent in Philadelphia and more than 20 percent in Honolulu and four areas in California, Long Beach, Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco.

Among gay men at the clinics, the rates of the bacterial infection jumped, to 38 percent in the first half of 2006 from 1.6 percent in 2001.

For 14 years, most cases of gonorrhea have been treated with a class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones. Now, officials at the center are urging doctors to prescribe drugs in the cephalosporin class.

No new antibiotics for gonorrhea are in the pipeline, officials of the centers told reporters by telephone.

“Now we are down to one class of drugs,” said Dr. Gail Bolan, an expert in sexually transmitted diseases at the California Department of Health Services. “Thats a very perilous situation to be in.”

Bolan is a spokeswoman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, a professional organization.

Health officials are also concerned about extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis and a number of other microbes like Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella penumoniae and Acinetobacter species that are resistant to most antibiotics.

The United States has an estimated 700,000 new cases of gonorrhea a year, occurring among sexually active people of both genders at all ages. It is the second most commonly reported infectious disease, behind chlamydia, another sexually transmitted disease.

After a substantial decline from 1975 to 1997, the gonorrhea rates had leveled off in recent years.

Action was taken Thursday because the level of resistance has exceeded the standard of 5 percent set by the centers and the World Health Organization. Although the centers recommendations are not binding, physicians generally follow them.

“We are running out of options,” said Dr. John Douglas Jr., who directs the division of sexually transmitted diseases prevention at the centers. Cephalosporins, like their cousin penicillin, thwart bacteria by damaging a microbes cell wall, not by attacking DNA as the fluoroquinolones do, Douglas said.

Gonorrhea has not shown resistance to the cephalosporins, which were first marketed in the United States in the 1980s, Douglas said. Now “increased vigilance is essential,” he said, because resistance could still develop at any time, particularly with increased usage.

The disease centers say doctors should now prescribe ceftriaxone, sold as Rocephin, which is injected once into a muscle. The centers also recommend the one-time use of cefixime, or Suprax, but tablets of cefixime are not available in the recommended 400-milligram dose.

These drugs are meant to substitute for the three currently recommended fluoroquinolones, ciprofloxacin, or Cipro; ofloxacin, or Floxin; and levofloxacin, or Levaquin.

For patients allergic to cephalosphins, the centers recommend one injection of spectinomycin, a drug not available in the United States.

Over the years, gonorrhea has become resistant to a number of antibiotic classes starting with sulfa, then penicillin and the tetracyclines before fluoroquinolones.

The disease centers have gradually cautioned against using fluoroquinolones because of the emergence of resistance in different regions.

In 2000, the centers recommended against fluoroquinolones for any patient who acquired gonorrhea in Hawaii, other Pacific Islands and Asia. The agency extended the recommendation to California in 2002. In 2004, the centers recommended that fluoroquinolones not be used among gay men with gonorrhea.

In 2005, Britain recommended against using fluoroquinolones for gonorrhea because of a resistance problem there.

The centers do not plan a letter to doctors on the recommendations. They are relying on news reports and state and local health departments to spread the information.