Erdogan quiets Istanbul with softer tone, but calm is likely to be brief

Prime Minister Erdogan temporarily placated Turkish protesters by pausing development of Gezi Park, but their grievances run deeper. It will take more to stop demonstrations for good.

By Jeremy Ravinsky,?Contributor / June 14, 2013

Protesters hold hands to isolate an area for others to attend prayers in Taksim square, Friday. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan softened his tone, telling Taksim Square's protesters that he has received their message and will at least temporarily halt plans for redeveloping Gezi Park.

Vadim Ghirda/AP

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Jeremy Ravinsky is an intern at the Christian Science Monitor's international desk. Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, Jeremy has lived in Boston for a number of years, attending Tufts University where he is a political science major. Before coming to the Monitor, Jeremy interned at GlobalPost in Boston and Bturn.com in Belgrade, Serbia.

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Today, only a day after issuing his ?final? warning to Taksim Square?s protesters, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan softened his tone, telling them that he has received their message and will at least temporarily halt plans for redeveloping Gezi Park.

After a night of meetings with protest representatives, Mr. Erdogan announced in a speech that the future of Gezi Park, the issue that sparked two-week long anti-government demonstrations, will be decided by the courts, reports?the Guardian.

Although tensions across the country have eased since reaching a fever pitch earlier this week,?many believe that Erdogan?s bid to defuse the unrest won?t be enough to end the demonstrations. For many, the protests are about something much bigger than the issue of Gezi Park: the direction Turkey will take in the future.

Protests began two weeks ago, when a group of peaceful protesters staged a demonstration to attempt to stop the destruction of Gezi Park, one of Istanbul?s last green spaces, to make way for a mall and housing complex. After police violently broke up the sit-in, thousands more took to the streets to protest what they see has the increasingly authoritarian style of Erdogan?s rule and the gradual erosion of secular values by his Islam-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), says?the Los Angeles Times.

Protesters accuse Erdogan, who won 50 percent of the vote in his last election, of behaving like an autocrat and only representing those who voted for him. Much of the country feels increasingly alienated by controversial policies, such as limiting the sale of alcohol and birth control.

Though at first defiant, even going so far as to label the protesters as "terrorists," Erdogan came under increasing pressure after several brutal police crackdowns which resulted in injuries to some 5,000 people. Yesterday the European Parliament voted to condemn Turkey for its use of violence against the demonstrators. And according to?Today?s Zaman, Germany is seeking to suspend Turkey?s EU accession talks.?

Should the court rule in favor of the government, a referendum will be held over the fate of Gezi Park. But many protesters told The Christian Science Monitor this is not enough.

Demonstrators and others at odds with the government say they are skeptical of its commitment to conducting a free and fair referendum about the park. Many point out that Erdogan could have held such a vote?long before the situation escalated to clashes?between protesters and police.

?We don?t trust the results of these elections. Maybe they?ll change the results,? says Yasin Arslan, an aeronautical engineer now in Gezi Park.?

What?s more, it is not clear that Erdogan's concessions will end the demonstrations. According to Al-Monitor, the Taksim Platform ? a coalition of 80 NGOs leading the protests ? have stated that they will neither honor a referendum nor vacate the park.

This weekend, as protestors remain at their camps, the AKP will be holding mass rallies in Istanbul and Ankara, reports?Today?s Zaman. Widely believed to be displays of force to counter the anti-government protests, AKP officials claim that the rallies are simply a part of their campaign for 2014 municipal elections.

But as Bloomberg points out, opposition parties have called for their cancellation, fearing that the rallies will only stoke tensions.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/c3miSRhkXPI/Erdogan-quiets-Istanbul-with-softer-tone-but-calm-is-likely-to-be-brief

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Flowers: Pistil leads pollen in life-and-death dance

June 20, 2013 ? Pollination, essential to much of life on earth, requires the explosive death of the male pollen tube in the female ovule. In new research, Brown University scientists describe the genetic and regulatory factors that compel the male's role in the process. Finding a way to tweak that performance could expand crop cross-breeding possibilities.

Millions of times on a spring day there is a dramatic biomolecular tango where the flower, rather than adorning a dancer's teeth, is the performer. In this dance, the female pistil leads, the male pollen tubes follow, and at the finish, the tubes explode and die. A new paper in Current Biology describes the genetically prescribed dance steps of the pollen tube and how their expression destines the tube for self-sacrifice, allowing flowering plants to reproduce.

High school biology leaves off with this: In normal pollination, sperm-carrying pollen grains land on the pistil's tip, or stigma, and grow tubes down its style to reach the ovaries in the ovules at the pistil's base. Once the tubes reach their destination, they burst open and release their sperm to fertilize each of the two ovaries in every ovule.

In his lab at Brown University, Mark Johnson, associate professor of biology, studies the true complexity of intercellular communications that conduct this process with exquisite precision.

Among the fundamental biology questions at play in the sex lives of flowers, for example, are how cells recognize each other, know what to do, and know when to do it. Last year, for instance, Johnson and his research group showed how, for all the hundreds of pollen tubes that grow through the pistil, each ovule receives exactly two fertile sperm.

As we drill into the details, it's a really great system for understanding how cellular identity is established and read by another cell," Johnson said. "The moves in the dance between the pollen and the pistil are a back-and-forth [of signals] as the pollen tube is growing. It's quite a dynamic system that happens over the course of a few hours."

Making the male listen

In the new paper, Johnson's group, led by third-year graduate student Alexander Leydon, sought to discover what convinces the male pollen tubes to stop growing and burst when they reach the ovule. Scientists have begun to understand the female's commands, but not the male's ability to listen.

What they knew from a prior study is that the gene expression in pollen tubes that had grown through a pistil was much different than that of pollen tubes grown in the lab. Leydon's first step, therefore, was to see which regulators of gene expression, or transcription factors, were at work in pistil-grown pollen tubes but not in the lab-grown ones. First they found one called MYB120 and through genomic analysis found two close associates: MYB101 and MYB97.

He tagged these with fluorescing proteins and found under the microscope that these transcription factors accumulated in the nuclei of the pollen tubes as they grew in the pistil.

Having placed them at the scene, Leydon then decided to see what happens when they aren't. He grew some normal arabadopsis plants, some in which a mutation disabled only one of the transcription factors, and other ones in which the genes for all three transcription factors were disabled. Then he took the pollen from each to pollinate normal flowers. The pollen tubes from all three plants reliably made it to ovules, but in 70 percent of the ovules encountered by the triple mutants, the pollen tubes didn't stop growing and then burst. Instead they kept growing, coiling, and remaining intact.

"The pollen tube gets to the right place, which you'd think is the hardest part," Johnson said. "But once it gets there it's unable to hear the message from the female to stop growing and burst."

From there the team looked for which pollen tube-expressed genes were being regulated by the MYB transcription factors. In pollen tubes that had grown through pistils, they found 11 that were grossly underexpressed in the mutated pollen tubes, compared to normal ones.

Finally, they looked at what those genes do. They encode a variety of tasks, but one in particular got Leydon's attention because it is responsible for the secretion of a protein called a thionin.

"For the thionin, I was especially excited because they have been described as being able to essentially burst open other cells," Leydon said. "That would be something that would be able to bind to a membrane and cause a pore to form."

In other words, expressing that gene could be pushing the pollen tube's self-destruct mechanism.

"This is not just a dialogue but a dialogue that ends in death," Leydon said. "It's a really well-controlled cell death situation."

Agricultural applications?

Future work, Johnson said, will include tracking down the relevant genes more fully and determining whether thionin is indeed the pollen tube buster that the genes and their MYB-related expression seem to indicate.

The work may also have implications beyond basic science, Johnson said.

Agronomists sometimes try to cross-breed species, such as barley and wheat, in hopes of creating new crops. That can be done if the different species are closely related and share the same number of chromosomes, but fertilization often fails at the pollen tube burst-and-release step.

Among crop plants, pollination means food.

"Understanding this molecular back-and-forth at all the different levels and stages will be useful to either engineer the process or introduce genetic diversity that will allow the reproductive process to be efficient even in difficult environmental conditions," Johnson said.

In addition to Leydon and Johnson, other Brown authors are Kristin Beale, Karolina Woroniecka, Elizabeth Castner, Jefferson Chen, and Casie Horgan. Ravishankar Palanivelu of the University of Arizona is a co-author. Chen, Castner, and Woroniecka were Brown undergraduatess who joined the project as Brown-Howard Hughes Medical Institute Summer Scholars.

The National Science Foundation funded the study with grant IOS-1021917. The researchers used the Brown University Genomics Core Facility in their work.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/963ICN1ISqU/130620132312.htm

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How James Gandolfini helped bring sophisticated storytelling to small screen

Gandolfini won three Emmy Awards for the role of Tony Soprano in the HBO series 'The Sopranos.' His mobster character paved the way for other flawed anti-heros on television. Fellow actors and celebrities remembered Gandolfini fondly following his death in Italy on Wednesday.?

By Piya Sinha-Roy,?Reuters, Steve Gorman,?Reuters / June 20, 2013

This file photo shows James Gandolfini, left, Steven Van Zandt and Tony Sirico, right, members of the cast of the HBO cable television mob drama "The Sopranos." HBO and the managers for Gandolfini say the actor died Wednesday in Italy.

AP Photo/HBO,Craig Blankenhorn

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James Gandolfini, the burly actor best known for his Emmy-winning portrayal of a conflicted?New Jersey?mob boss in the groundbreaking?cable TV?series "The Sopranos," died on Wednesday vacationing in?Italy.?

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Gandolfini, whose role as?Tony Soprano?made him a household name while transforming the?HBO?network and ushering in a new era of drama on American television, had been scheduled to attend the closing of the Taormina Film Festival in?Sicily?on Saturday.

He died in?Rome,?HBO?spokeswoman?Mara Mikialian?told Reuters.

Since "The Sopranos" ended its six-season run in June 2007, Gandolfini?appeared in a number of big-screen roles, including "Zero Dark Thirty," a film about the hunt for Osama?bin Laden, and the comedy "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone."

At the time of his death, he had been working on an upcoming?HBO?series "Criminal Justice."?HBO?declined to elaborate on the series other than to say that it was in development and that Gandolfini?was a part of it.

He had two motion pictures due in theaters next year.

"We're all in shock and feeling immeasurable sadness at the loss of a beloved member of our family," the network said in a statement. "He was a special man, a great talent, but more importantly, a gentle and loving person who treated everyone, no matter their title or position, with equal respect."

Gandolfini, a virtual unknown when cast in "The Sopranos," broke ground with his signature portrait of the show's title character, the head of a fictional?New Jersey?mob family.

Although he shared the character's Italian-American heritage and?New Jersey?roots, the actor was known for a reserved demeanor off-camera and generally shied away from publicity.

As?Tony Soprano, Gandolfini?created a gangster different from any previously seen in American television or film. He was capable of killing enemies with his own hands but was prone to panic attacks. He loved his wife,?Carmela, played by?Edie Falco, and was a doting father, but he carried on a string of extramarital affairs.

He regularly saw a therapist, portrayed by?Lorraine Bracco, to work out his anxiety problems and issues with his mother.

By the start of the show's final season, Gandolfini?suggested he was ready to move on to more gentle roles once his TV mobster days were over.

"I'm too tired to be a tough guy or any of that stuff anymore," he said. "We pretty much used all that up in this show."

Critical acclaim?

The program, which earned Gandolfini?three Emmy Awards as best lead actor in a drama series, was considered by many critics at the time the finest drama to have aired on U.S. television.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/9BIOuV-r-5M/How-James-Gandolfini-helped-bring-sophisticated-storytelling-to-small-screen

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