Cubs targeting Korean left-hander Ryu

By Phil Rogers, Tribune reporter

7:02 p.m. CST, November 8, 2012

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. -- The Cubs are interested in adding Korean left-hander Hyun-jin Ryu to their starting rotation for at least the next few years.

Major League Baseball sources confirmed that the Cubs were among the teams who entered a bid for Ryu before Thursday's 4 p.m. Central deadline. He has been posted by the Hanwha Eagles in the Korean Baseball Organization, and the Eagles now have four business days to determine if they are going to accept the highest of the sealed bids, which they have been forwarded by MLB.

Ryu, 25, is represented by Scott Boras. If the Eagles accept the bid, the team making it will have 30 days to sign him. If a deal cannot be reached, no money would change hands and Ryu would remain property of the Eagles.

According to scouts, Ryu throws in the low-90s and has a plus changeup, a skill set that compares favorably to 27-year-old Wei-Yin Chen, the Taiwanese left-hander who went 12-11 for Baltimore last season. He has averaged 181 innings a season in the KBO, leading the league in strikeouts five times. He was a major contributor to the Korean team that won a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics and finished second in the 2009 World Baseball Classic.

It is not known how many other teams bid for Ryu.

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“Dancing” co-host Brooke Burke has thyroid cancer

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Dancing with the Stars” co-host Brooke Burke said on Thursday that she has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and will need surgery.

The television presenter and model said in a three-minute video posted on the website Modernmom.com that she will need her thyroid removed.

“I need to have thyroid surgery and a thyroidectomy, which means I’m going to have a nice, big scar right here on neck,” Burke said, drawing a finger across her throat.

Burke, a former winner of ABC’s celebrity ballroom dancing competition, said she had a biopsy in July, but it had taken her months to go public with the results.

“I’m ready to deal with it, and I’m going to be fine,” she said.

There was no word on when the surgery would take place, but Burke’s publicist said her work schedule for “Dancing with the Stars” would not be affected.

Burke, 47, said in July that her doctor suggested she undergo a thyroid ultrasound after he felt a lump in her neck during a routine physical.

The thyroid is a gland in the neck that produces hormones that regulate vital body functions, such as heart rate and blood pressure.

Burke’s co-host Tom Bergeron said on Thursday during an appearance on the CBS chat show “The Talk” that he had known about her condition for several months. “We are all there with her,” he said.

“I’ve known about this for a few months … I have had experience with this in my family. You never want to hear the word cancer. But thyroid cancer is one of the most treatable cancers. It has an incredibly high success rate,” he said.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ask an Expert: Wondering About Alzheimer’s? Ask Here

This week’s Ask the Expert features Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, who will answer questions related to Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss. He is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and an author of “The Alzheimer’s Action Plan.” Dr. Doraiswamy has also served as an adviser to government agencies, advocacy groups and businesses.

About five million Americans today live with Alzheimer’s disease, and a new diagnosis is made about every 70 seconds. Cases are expected to triple over the coming decades as baby boomers age.

Misperceptions and misdiagnoses are common about Alzheimer’s, which ranks second to only cancer among diseases that adults fear the most. Many people do not understand that there are dozens of causes for memory loss besides Alzheimer’s, including many that can be fully reversed if caught early.

Among the questions Dr. Doraiswamy is prepared to answer:

What are the best tests to determine if it is or isn’t Alzheimer’s?

How do you determine your own risk?

What are the family-care options? Medications for memory? Medications for behavior problems? Preventive strategies?

What has been learned from the latest clinical trials?

How can you improve your memory?

Please leave your questions in the comments section. Answers will be posted on Wednesday.

You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming.

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McDonald's sales drop, first time since 2003

McDonald's Corp. reported its first decline in monthly U.S. same store sales in nine years Thursday, as the chain began to suffer problems plaguing the rest of the fast food industry for several years.

Sales at restaurants open more than a year declined 2.2 percent. Same store sales also declined in Europe, 2.2 percent, and the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa region, 2.4 percent.

The chain cited lower demand and greater competition for the lower sales. While hamburger competitors Burger King and Wendy’s were walloped by the onset of the recession, both  have changed hands in recent years and launched new menu items that better compete with McDonald’s including expanded breakfast offerings, improved coffee options and more innovative salads.

"Though October's sales results reflect the pervasive challenges of today's global marketplace, I am confident that our strategies and the adjustments we are making in response to the current business headwinds will build sales momentum and drive sustained, profitable growth," McDonald's CEO Don Thompson said. 

Although the decline is historic for the world's largest restaurant chain, which has been on a roll since the beginning of its historic turnaround in 2003, it was not unexpected. Analysts have been tempering expectations and downgrading the stock for months.

To rev up sales, McDonald's has been working to emphasize value in markets around the world.

In the U.S., for example, McDonald's is stepping up advertising for its Dollar Menu after its attempt to market an "Extra Value Menu" for slightly higher prices fell flat. But the company said Thursday that the efforts were offset by "modest consumer demand" and competition.

In particular, McDonald's is facing stiffer competition from longtime rivals Burger King and Wendy's, which are both in the midst of reviving their brands with new ad campaigns and improved menus. Taco Bell, owned by Yum Brands Inc., is also enjoying growth with the help of new offerings such as it Doritos Locos Tacos and higher-end Cantina Bell bowls and burritos.

Stock slipped 0.99 percent in pre-market trades, to $86 in early trading. McDonald's hit an all-time high of $101.74 in February.

Baird analyst David Tarantino maintained an outperform rating on McDonald's, saying in a research note that, "We are cautiously optimistic that better trends can emerge as McDonald's gets past a wall of challenging comparisons in upcoming months."

Tarrantino added that though results "could remain soft" through early 2013, "we see opportunity for better performance to emerge in 2013 as a whole," because of emphasis on value offerings, lower ingredient costs, and reduced currency impact.

eyork@tribune.com | Twitter: @emilyyork

- Reuters contributed to this report

MCD Net Income Quarterly data by YCharts

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Exclusive: Google Ventures beefs up fund size to $300 million a year

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Jury begins deliberations in cop beating trial

Jurors at a trial involving a notorious 2007 beating of a female bartender by an off-duty Chicago officer began deliberations Wednesday that will include considering a rarely tested question -- does the Chicago Police Department have a code of silence?

In the final argument to jurors before deliberations began, an attorney for the bartender, Karolina Obrycka, decried what he described as decades of unofficial protection for officers.

“The evidence you heard didn't come from a television script or a movie script,” attorney Terry Ekl said. “There is an active, live code of silence. It is part of the culture of the Chicago Police Department.”

In the high-stakes trial at the U.S. Dirksen Courthouse, lawyers for Obrycka contended that the city as well as Officer Anthony Abbate are accountable for the beating and the cover-up that allegedly followed because of the longstanding code of silence.

Over 2 1/2 weeks, the jury heard expert evidence about the department's allegedly weak discipline of bad cops as well as testimony from numerous witnesses about an allegedly extensive effort to protect Abbate after the disturbing, videotaped beating at Jesse's Short Stop Inn was released and became an Internet sensation.

On Wednesday Ekl listed how a drunken Abbate engaged in a series of criminal acts on Feb. 19, 2007, that average citizens would be held accountable for -- assaulting and harassing bar patrons, beating and kicking Obrycka and then driving home intoxicated.

“He doesn't have any concern at all,” Ekl said. “It's in his DNA. It's part of his life. He's a Chicago police officer. You think someone from the … district is going to come over and arrest him? No.”

The jury deliberated for about five hours Wednesday before recessing until next week because of scheduling conflicts for the judge.

Ekl's closing argument was interrupted by several objections from city attorneys, particularly when he criticized their defense for using diversions and ignoring or distorting evidence.

“When you hear the arguments, is it any wonder the code of silence has existed for decades?” Ekl said.

Abbate, who was ultimately convicted of a felony and fired from the police force, potentially faces liability over allegations that he conspired with friends, including police pals, to threaten Obrycka not to pursue charges against him. If the jury agrees that a code of silence exists, the city could be held liable for the vicious beating.

From the start, city attorneys said they were fighting Obrycka's lawsuit on principle. Abbate was off-duty and his actions had nothing to do with his work as a Chicago police officer, they said.

They have blamed his actions that night on his extenstive drinking, calling it “absurd” that Abbate was counting on police to protect him. They also argued that he fled after the attack, showing that he feared getting in trouble, and was later investigated by the department.

“It is clear from the video that Anthony Abbate acted out of rage,” attorney Barrett Rubens, representing the city, said Tuesday in her closing argument. “… Anthony Abbate did what he did because he was hammered.”

In his closing, Ekl also addressed a messy and complicated aspect of the case -- the numerous conflicting stories from Chicago police officials and Cook County prosecutors about how aggressively they wanted to punish Abbate.

City attorneys have maintained that Chicago police wanted to pursue felonies -- even though two department investigators had Obrycka sign a misdemeanor complaint within three days of the beating.

Debra Kirby, then head of the department's Internal Affairs Division, testified that she conveyed her desire for felony charges to Thomas Bilyk, a Cook County prosecutor who was supervising the Abbate investigation, in a phone call days after the beating.

But Bilyk denied the conversation happened. In her closing argument, Rubens suggested Bilyk didn't tell the truth and reminded jurors of a police report in which a Chicago detective said that Bilyk had called for lesser misdemeanor charges at a Feb. 23 meeting.

But Ekl, with his voice rising, told the jury Wednesday that the report was dated 23 days after the meeting -- and just two days after Abbate surrendered to police and pressure was mounting on the state's attorney's office to upgrade the misdemeanor charges.

asweeney@tribune.com

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Death of the cassette tape much exaggerated

LONDON (Reuters) – The widening gap between the amount of data the world produces and our capacity to store it is giving a new lease of life to the humble cassette tape.

Although consumers have abandoned the audio cassette in favor of the ubiquitous iPod, organizations with large amounts of data, from patient records to capacity-hungry video archives, have continued to use tape as a cheap and secure storage medium.

Researchers at IBM are trying to keep this 60-year old technology relevant for at least the next decade and they are getting help from rising energy costs, which are forcing companies to look for cheaper alternatives to stacks of power-hungry hard drives.

Evangelos Eleftheriou and his colleagues at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, have developed a cassette just 10 cm by 10cm by 2cm that can hold about 35 terabytes of data, the equivalent of a library with 400 kilometers of bookshelves.

“It is really the greenest storage technology,” Eleftheriou told Reuters. “Tape at rest, consumes literally zero power.”

Unlike hard drive storage devices, which have to be on continuously, tape systems only consume power when data is being read or recorded, giving them a carbon footprint a fraction that of their disc-based counterparts.

Latency is the biggest disadvantage. Tapes have to be retrieved, usually by a robotic selector, and then loaded into a reading device.

But for much of the world’s archived data, access time is not critical. From legal archives and company records kept to comply with legislation like the Sarbanes Oxley Act in the United States, to data on traffic flow and weather patterns, keeping secure copies is more important than instant access.

“If you have big data then you have really big backups,” said Eleftheriou.

This is borne out by an estimate from consultancy Coughlin Associates that about 400 exabytes, equal to 20 million times the content of U.S. Library of Congress, is currently stored on tape.

The new IBM cassette, originally developed with Fuji Film, packs about 29.5 billion bits on a square inch of tape using a coating made from the chemical compound barium ferrite, which maximizes so-called linear density – the amount of data that can be squeezed onto a length of the tape.

The other limitation is the number of tracks that can be laid down and the researchers have developed novel nanopositioning technologies that can position the read and write heads with an accuracy of 10 to 15 billionths of a meter.

SERIOUSLY BIG DATA

Eleftheriou and his team believe they can increase the storage capacity to 100 billion bits per square inch and they hope this will make tape storage a contender for one of the world’s biggest data collection projects – the huge radio telescope known as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

In just over 10 years the SKA will start scanning the skies from two remote sites in South Africa and Australia, and it will generate 10 times the data traffic of the global internet.

“There’s going to be a lot of data pouring out of what is essentially a giant computer with a few bits of metal (the dishes and the antennae) on the ends,” said Andy Faulkner, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and one of the project engineers on the SKA.

Faulkner said there has been quite a shift towards using hard drives in astronomy in recent years because their capacity has grown so far and fast, but the SKA will be a different kettle of fish, not least because of the vast amount of data it will generate and the restrictions on power usage from its remote location.

“In truth, nobody knows just yet what we will be using given the 10-year time frame but tape storage is very interesting because you don’t necessarily need real time access to everything.”

(Editing by Jon Hemming)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ask an Expert: Wondering About Alzheimer’s? Ask Here

This week’s Ask the Expert features Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, who will answer questions related to Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss. He is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and an author of “The Alzheimer’s Action Plan.” Dr. Doraiswamy has also served as an adviser to government agencies, advocacy groups and businesses.

About five million Americans today live with Alzheimer’s disease, and a new diagnosis is made about every 70 seconds. Cases are expected to triple over the coming decades as baby boomers age.

Misperceptions and misdiagnoses are common about Alzheimer’s, which ranks second to only cancer among diseases that adults fear the most. Many people do not understand that there are dozens of causes for memory loss besides Alzheimer’s, including many that can be fully reversed if caught early.

Among the questions Dr. Doraiswamy is prepared to answer:

What are the best tests to determine if it is or isn’t Alzheimer’s?

How do you determine your own risk?

What are the family-care options? Medications for memory? Medications for behavior problems? Preventive strategies?

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'Fiscal cliff' takes center stage

Now that Wall Street knows President Obama will stay in the White House, investors' attention has returned to looming crises facing the U.S. and European economies.

Major stock indexes were down more than 2 percent midway through the first trading session after election day.

At the top of the agenda is the "fiscal cliff," the automatic spending cuts and tax hikes looming at year's end. If Obama cannot successfully resolve the crisis with a House still controlled by Republicans, economists have warned that the "cliff" could slow growth and push the U.S. back into recession.

"We've gotten certainty on the presidency and now we move into the uncertainty of where we were before -- the fiscal cliff," said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist at Prudential Financial. "The market's not going to have much patience to wait to see when the negotiations begin in earnest and how they evolve."

The Dow Jones industrial average regained some ground but was still down 303 points, or 2.3 percent, to 12,943 in midday trading.

The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index was down 32 points, or 2.2 percent, to 1,396. The Nasdaq was down 71 points, or 2.4 percent, to 2,941.

Corporations reported sluggish revenues in the third quarter, signaling slowing economic growth regardless of the fiscal cliff, Krosby noted. Declining company fortunes could lead to job cuts and further drags on economic growth as consumer demand falls.

Also weighing on investors' minds: Continuing worries out of Europe. Economic data out of Germany indicate that not even the continent's most powerful economy is immune to the Eurozone slowdown, as European Central Bank President Mario Draghi noted in remarks Wednesday.

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Apple's shares slide 4 percent to five-month low

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