WASHINGTON (AP) ? For all the worries about potential major problems at polling places, the worst impediments to voting on Election Day were exceedingly long lines at dozens of precincts.
Hundreds of voters stood in line to cast ballots for well over four hours past the 7 p.m. closing times in Miami-Dade County, Fla., even after President Barack Obama was projected Tuesday night as winning re-election over Republican Mitt Romney. Long waits were also common in Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere.
Most states allow voters who were in line when polls closed to cast ballots. Candidates, political operatives and their supporters turned to social media to encourage voters through the long wait. "(hash)StayInLine (hash)StayInLine (hash)StayInLine," Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin tweeted.
"If you were in line before your poll closed you still have the right to vote," film director Spike Lee tweeted. "We are counting on you."
Other problems with voter access, machine failures and some legal skirmishes, especially in Pennsylvania, were scattered, but there didn't appear to be any wholesale disenfranchisement of voters. Tense confrontations among poll monitors were few, and no major instances of election fraud were reported.
"Despite the shameful attempts to suppress voting, voters are standing up," said Bob Edgar, president and chief executive of Common Cause.
High turnout rather than glitches appeared to be the cause of the long lines, but there were plenty of other problems around the country. In Pennsylvania, the day began with a confrontation involving Republican inspectors over access to some polls and a voting machine that lit up for Romney even when a voter pressed the Obama button.
The Election Protection coalition of civil rights and voting access groups said they had gotten more than 80,000 complaints and questions on a toll-free voter protection hotline.
In Philadelphia, the Republican Party said 75 legally credentialed voting inspectors were blocked from polling places in the heavily Democratic city, prompting the GOP to obtain a court order to gain access. Local prosecutors were also looking into the reports. Democratic Party officials did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Also in Pennsylvania, Department of State spokesman Ron Ruman said the voting machine in the central part of the state that switched a person's vote from Obama to Romney was put back into service after being recalibrated. Video of what Ruman called a "momentary glitch" was widely viewed on YouTube.
Pennsylvania was also the scene of what a state Common Cause official called "widespread" confusion over voter ID requirements. The state this year enacted a new photo ID requisite, but a judge put it on hold for Tuesday's election amid concern many voters would not be able to comply in time.
Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause in Pennsylvania, said election workers in many places were demanding IDs even though they are not required. It was unclear, however, just how many voters may have been turned away or discouraged.
Also in Philadelphia, a judge ordered a mural of Obama covered up after a Republican election worker snapped a picture of it at a school polling place, according to a statement from the Republican Party.
In Florida, a robocall glitch occurred in Pinellas County, where the supervisor of elections said about 12,000 voters were wrongly told they could vote Wednesday.
Spokeswoman Nancy Whitlock said the office had contracted with a firm, callfire.com, to call voters who had requested mail ballots but had not yet returned them. Whitlock said the calls with the erroneous election date went to those voters mistakenly Tuesday; a second call went out advising them of the error.
In Ohio, officials in Franklin County, seat of the state's capital, barred the tea party-linked True the Vote group from monitoring polling places because applications to do so weren't filed properly.
Catherine Engelbrecht, president of the Houston-based group, claimed the Ohio Democratic Party had pressured several local candidates to withdraw their permission for the group's members to act as election observers.
Both political parties in Nebraska accused each other of voter disenfranchisement after a woman claimed she was handed a ballot already filled out for Romney and Republican Rep. Lee Terry ? a situation elections officials chalked up to a mistake. The GOP, meanwhile, contended some voters were being falsely told in recorded phone calls that they were ineligible to cast ballots.
In New Orleans, advocates said they received several complaints from large Vietnamese-American communities that in at least three major polling places, language services were not provided to voters needing help with translations. Of particular concern were several proposed constitutional amendments and ballot initiatives, said Jennifer Coco, a volunteer field director with the Louisiana Election Protection Program.
Meanwhile, voters in several storm-ravaged areas in New York and New Jersey expressed relief and even elation at being able to vote at all, considering the devastation from Superstorm Sandy. Lines were long in Point Pleasant, N.J., where residents from the shore communities of Point Pleasant Beach and Mantoloking had to cast their ballots due to damage in their hometowns. Many people still have no power eight days after Sandy pummeled the shore.
"Nothing is more important than voting. What is the connection between voting and this?" said Alex Shamis, a resident of hard-hit Staten Island, gesturing to his mud-filled home.
Any voting problems were being closely monitored after months of legal and political battles over more voter ID restrictions and other laws, mostly fruitless hunts for ineligible people on voting rolls in many states and sustained claims that black and Hispanic voters are being targeted for intimidation and suppression.
It remained possible that court fights will continue on some of these issues well after the election.
___
Associated Press writers Suzanne Gamboa in Washington; Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Fla.; A.J. Connelly in New York; Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio; and Patrick Walters in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
___
Follow Curt Anderson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Miamicurt
Cancer data in the 'cloud' could lead to more effective treatmentPublic release date: 6-Nov-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Phil Sneiderman prs@jhu.edu 443-287-9960 Johns Hopkins University
Storing music and photos on distant computers via "cloud" technology is nothing new. But Johns Hopkins researchers are now using this tactic to collect detailed information from thousands of cancer cell samples. The goal is to help doctors make better predictions about how a patient's illness will progress and what type of treatment will be most effective.
The project, supported by a new $3.75 million National Cancer Institute grant, was launched because researchers now realize that cancer cells affecting the same type of tissue can behave differently in different patients. Prostate cancers may grow rapidly in one patient, but expand at a glacial pace in another. A drug that kills a tumor in one patient may be useless or even harmful in the next patient.
To help doctors prepare a more personalized medical prognosis and treatment plan, Johns Hopkins has assembled experts in cancer and engineering, led by Denis Wirtz , associate director of the university's Institute for NanoBioTechnology. The team has begun characterizing and storing cancer data collected through a process called high-throughput cell phenotyping.
"We use scanning microscopy to take pictures of the size and shape of cancer cells," said Wirtz, who also directs the Johns Hopkins Physical Sciences-Oncology Center. "We also extract information about what is happening inside the cells and at the genetic level. We make notes of the age and gender of the patient and any treatment received. Looked at as a whole, this information can help us identify a 'signature' for a certain type of cancer.
That gives us a better idea of how it spreads and how it responds to certain drugs."
He added, "The long-range goal is to make this data available through the Internet to physicians who are diagnosing and treating cancer patients around the world."
Wirtz , a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the university's Whiting School of Engineering, has been working with School of Medicine researchers Ralph Hruban and Anirban Maitra to begin the database with material from the files of thousands of cancer patients who have been evaluated and treated at Johns Hopkins. The patients' personal information has been deleted, but the remaining medical case data allows the researchers to trace the course of the disease from initial testing through treatment and outcome.
"This technology may provide a way to centralize specimen data, images and analysis in a way that hasn't been done before," said Maitra, a professor of pathology and oncology, "and we'll be using the information now to find better ways to treat disease."
The Johns Hopkins team will soon collect similar data from other major U.S. cancer research centers that are also supported by the National Institutes of Health. The initial focus will be pancreatic cancer, which is particularly aggressive and lethal.
"We may be able to correlate DNA changes that occur in individual pancreatic cancer cells with the appearance of these cells at the cellular level," said Hruban, a professor of pathology and oncology and director of the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center. "The potential for this approach to provide insight into the fundamental biology of pancreatic cancer is significant, as are the potential clinical applications in predicting a patient's prognosis and in guiding therapy."
Other types of the disease, including breast and prostate cancer, will be addressed in the near future. Early data is being stored on computers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under an arrangement funded by the NIH.
According to Wirtz, the details recorded in the online database will differ from those produced in traditional biopsy evaluations. Typically, information about a patient's disease is obtained by averaging the results from trillions of cells that have been blended together.
With the new scanning system, however, the Johns Hopkins researchers will obtain views of individual cells retrieved from individual patients, even from different parts of the same organ.
This ability to examine single cells is important, Wirtz said, because scientists have discovered that even cells that possess the identical genetic makeup can vary in other small ways that affect the behavior of cancer. For example, these tiny variations in genetically identical cells can cause some to be vulnerable to a particular cancer drug.
"We've come to realize that it is the heterogeneity -- the diversity of cells that have different characteristics -- that is important in evaluating a cancer case," Wirtz said. "In the end, what matters is the cell properties. That's what we measure."
Researchers will begin their studies on clinical samples collected at Johns Hopkins to determine how well the technology works and validate it's potential before it can be used to aid clinical decision-making.
The software and hardware used in the high-throughput cell phenotyping process is protected by patents obtained through the Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer office. The $3.75 million National Cancer Institute grant (CA174388) will be disbursed to the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology over a five-year period. The funds were allocated through the National Institutes of Health's Common Fund Single Cell Analysis Program.
###
Related links:
Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology: http://inbt.jhu.edu/
Johns Hopkins Engineering in Oncology Center: http://psoc.inbt.jhu.edu/
Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/kimmel_cancer_center/
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Cancer data in the 'cloud' could lead to more effective treatmentPublic release date: 6-Nov-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Phil Sneiderman prs@jhu.edu 443-287-9960 Johns Hopkins University
Storing music and photos on distant computers via "cloud" technology is nothing new. But Johns Hopkins researchers are now using this tactic to collect detailed information from thousands of cancer cell samples. The goal is to help doctors make better predictions about how a patient's illness will progress and what type of treatment will be most effective.
The project, supported by a new $3.75 million National Cancer Institute grant, was launched because researchers now realize that cancer cells affecting the same type of tissue can behave differently in different patients. Prostate cancers may grow rapidly in one patient, but expand at a glacial pace in another. A drug that kills a tumor in one patient may be useless or even harmful in the next patient.
To help doctors prepare a more personalized medical prognosis and treatment plan, Johns Hopkins has assembled experts in cancer and engineering, led by Denis Wirtz , associate director of the university's Institute for NanoBioTechnology. The team has begun characterizing and storing cancer data collected through a process called high-throughput cell phenotyping.
"We use scanning microscopy to take pictures of the size and shape of cancer cells," said Wirtz, who also directs the Johns Hopkins Physical Sciences-Oncology Center. "We also extract information about what is happening inside the cells and at the genetic level. We make notes of the age and gender of the patient and any treatment received. Looked at as a whole, this information can help us identify a 'signature' for a certain type of cancer.
That gives us a better idea of how it spreads and how it responds to certain drugs."
He added, "The long-range goal is to make this data available through the Internet to physicians who are diagnosing and treating cancer patients around the world."
Wirtz , a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the university's Whiting School of Engineering, has been working with School of Medicine researchers Ralph Hruban and Anirban Maitra to begin the database with material from the files of thousands of cancer patients who have been evaluated and treated at Johns Hopkins. The patients' personal information has been deleted, but the remaining medical case data allows the researchers to trace the course of the disease from initial testing through treatment and outcome.
"This technology may provide a way to centralize specimen data, images and analysis in a way that hasn't been done before," said Maitra, a professor of pathology and oncology, "and we'll be using the information now to find better ways to treat disease."
The Johns Hopkins team will soon collect similar data from other major U.S. cancer research centers that are also supported by the National Institutes of Health. The initial focus will be pancreatic cancer, which is particularly aggressive and lethal.
"We may be able to correlate DNA changes that occur in individual pancreatic cancer cells with the appearance of these cells at the cellular level," said Hruban, a professor of pathology and oncology and director of the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center. "The potential for this approach to provide insight into the fundamental biology of pancreatic cancer is significant, as are the potential clinical applications in predicting a patient's prognosis and in guiding therapy."
Other types of the disease, including breast and prostate cancer, will be addressed in the near future. Early data is being stored on computers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under an arrangement funded by the NIH.
According to Wirtz, the details recorded in the online database will differ from those produced in traditional biopsy evaluations. Typically, information about a patient's disease is obtained by averaging the results from trillions of cells that have been blended together.
With the new scanning system, however, the Johns Hopkins researchers will obtain views of individual cells retrieved from individual patients, even from different parts of the same organ.
This ability to examine single cells is important, Wirtz said, because scientists have discovered that even cells that possess the identical genetic makeup can vary in other small ways that affect the behavior of cancer. For example, these tiny variations in genetically identical cells can cause some to be vulnerable to a particular cancer drug.
"We've come to realize that it is the heterogeneity -- the diversity of cells that have different characteristics -- that is important in evaluating a cancer case," Wirtz said. "In the end, what matters is the cell properties. That's what we measure."
Researchers will begin their studies on clinical samples collected at Johns Hopkins to determine how well the technology works and validate it's potential before it can be used to aid clinical decision-making.
The software and hardware used in the high-throughput cell phenotyping process is protected by patents obtained through the Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer office. The $3.75 million National Cancer Institute grant (CA174388) will be disbursed to the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology over a five-year period. The funds were allocated through the National Institutes of Health's Common Fund Single Cell Analysis Program.
###
Related links:
Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology: http://inbt.jhu.edu/
Johns Hopkins Engineering in Oncology Center: http://psoc.inbt.jhu.edu/
Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/kimmel_cancer_center/
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
BIRMINGHAM, England ? As WWE once again made history by bringing SuperSmackDown LIVE to the U.K. for the first time, Randy Orton squared off with Wade Barrett in a furious Falls Count Anywhere Match, Sheamus & William Regal looked to get gigantic retribution on Big Show & Wade Barrett and Kofi Kingston put his Intercontinental Title on the line against The Miz.??
An irate Sheamus took issue with World Heavyweight Champion Big Show?s barroom sneak attack (PHOTOS) A very angry Sheamus joined Michael Cole in the ring as the lights came up on an epic SuperSmackDown LIVE. Clearly not in the mood to be interviewed, he insisted that Cole leave the ring, as he paced back and forth like a caged animal.
The rage of the first Irish-born WWE and World Heavyweight Champion was the direct result of an altercation with World Heavyweight Champion Big Show the previous night inside a Birmingham pub. In the volatile incident ? first reported by WWE.com and captured by a mobile phone recording (WATCH) ? The Celtic Warrior was sharing a pint with former Intercontinental Champion and King of the Ring winner William Regal, the same English grappler who has been a tremendous influence on Sheamus? and so many other Superstar?s careers.
In an act of pure aggression, Big Show suddenly launched a surprise assault from nowhere, not only unleashing his massive fists on Sheamus, but also hitting the KO Punch on Regal ? a move that the red-haired competitor interpreted as an incredibly disrespectful act to both himself and the legendary Blackpool brawler. In response, the fuming Sheamus called out Big Show to finish what he started, 12 days before their Survivor Series World Title clash. (MATCH PREVIEW)
The giant answered this request from the TitanTron, calling Sheamus ?an ungrateful ginger? for ignoring the fact that the massive champion didn?t hurt him worse than he did. He also proclaimed that he wouldn?t waste his time with him on SuperSmackDown LIVE.
Wade Barrett interrupted the verbal confrontation, just one day before he will mix it up with Sheamus in a volatile one-on-one contest on WWE Main Event ? Wednesday on ION Television at 8/7 CT.? After the bare-knuckled brawler questioned Sheamus? sanity for wanting to face both him and Big Show on consecutive nights, the three-time World Champion challenged Barrett to come to the ring himself. Instead, the English grappler opted to save his time and walked away.
As Barrett was strolling through the back moments later, SmackDown General Manager Booker T caught up with him, informing him that, after talking to William Regal, Barrett & Show will take on Regal & Sheamus in a SuperSmackDown LIVE Main Event tag team match!?
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KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's opposition sought on Tuesday to keep up pressure over an election they say was rigged, but the leadership of President Viktor Yanukovich blocked their bid for a partial recount.
Deputies from Yanukovich's Party of the Regions traded charges in parliament with the bloc of jailed ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko about an election where the ruling party seems to have held its majority despite a strong opposition showing.
International monitors say the October 28 election in the former Soviet republic of 46 million was flawed in its run-up and marred by attempts to massage results in the vote count.
Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), far-right nationalists and a liberal party headed by boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko, have held street protests over the election despite winning seats in the 450-member parliament.
But the Yanukovich government signaled it would fight opposition attempts to win a recount in 13 electoral districts where they say their candidates were cheated out of victory.
"Once again we're hearing calls for destabilization," said Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, referring to the 2004-5 "Orange Revolution" street protests against vote-rigging which doomed Yanukovich's first bid for the presidency.
"We have no extra money for absurd ideas. The country has held elections. It has formed a parliament. It will work according to its schedule," he said.
The outgoing parliament, dominated by Yanukovich's party and its allies, stalled opposition pressure for a partial recount by setting up a committee to look into the issue.
Central electoral authorities on Monday offered to meet the opposition half-way, proposing to hold a re-run of the vote in a handful of districts. But Batkivshchyna rejected that and deputies questioned whether election authorities had the right to make such an offer.
Even if the 13 contested seats were to go to the opposition, they would not upset the final outcome of the election in which the Party of the Regions can secure a majority of more than 225 seats, assuming help from traditional parliamentary allies such as the communists.
Yanukovich's pro-business Regions, which is financed by wealthy industrialists, say they alone can provide stability in the country which is a major exporter of steel and grain.
The opposition accuses the government of fostering corruption and cronyism and wants to stop him securing a second term as president in 2015.
Opposition leaders said they would press on with their demands. But with the numbers of demonstrators at election headquarters in Kiev down to just a few hundred, the steam seemed to be running out of the protest.
Under election law, Ukrainian authorities have until November 12 to announce preliminary overall results and binding official results by November 17.
"We are demanding that the central electoral committee conduct a count of the vote (in the 13 districts) and announce our candidates the winners," Arseny Yatseniuk, a former economy minister who heads the united opposition in the absence of Tymoshenko, told journalists.
"We will not vote for a farce. We will demand from President Yanukovich that he be the guarantor of the constitution and not the guarantor of fraud," he said.
Klitschko, the WBC world heavyweight champion who heads the UDAR (Punch) party, said: "Up to November 12 we will continue to keep up moral pressure on those at the central electoral commission and the presidential administration and will show them that votes should not simply be stolen."
(Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Natalia Zinets; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
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Public release date: 6-Nov-2012
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