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– Human blood is rich with genetic material, and scientists have in recent years taken many steps forward in decoding it. The latest announcement—that a blood test can spot cancer at its earliest stages—has the potential to save millions of lives as treatment is administered earlier in the disease's progression, reports Reuters. Reporting in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists say that by analyzing DNA fragments in blood to look for several dozen cancer-driver genes, they spotted 86 out of 138 stage 1 and stage 2 cancers; they also confirmed no trace of cancer in 44 healthy patients (in other words, there were zero false positives). Some call this minimally invasive test a "liquid biopsy." "This is one of the first studies that has looked directly at early-stage cancers," says lead author Dr. Victor Velculescu, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. While the test is proof-of-concept and not yet ready for prime time, detecting 62% of cancers that were only in stages 1 or 2 is a major milestone, experts say. For instance, less than one in five ovarian cancers are caught that early, when the survival rate is higher than 90%; those that are caught after the cancer has spread face a dramatically lower 40% survival rate five years out, per HealthDay News. For this study, however, the blood test caught early-stage ovarian cancer 68% of the time. Scientists hope they can get the test much closer to a 100% detection rate. (This cancer treatment is being hailed as the most exciting in a lifetime.)

The detection and analysis of cell-free DNA in patients’ blood are becoming increasingly accepted in oncology. However, this approach has generally been applied for the monitoring of patients with existing tumors. It has not been useful for early diagnosis of cancer because of insufficient sensitivity to detect really small tumors that only shed minute quantities of DNA into the blood, as well as difficulties with identifying cancer-associated genetic changes without knowing what mutations are present in the primary tumor. A method developed by Phallen et al., called targeted error correction sequencing, addresses both of these limitations and demonstrates the feasibility of detecting circulating cell-free DNA from many early tumors, suggesting its potential use for cancer screening.

 Early detection and intervention are likely to be the most effective means for reducing morbidity and mortality of human cancer. However, development of methods for noninvasive detection of early-stage tumors has remained a challenge. We have developed an approach called targeted error correction sequencing (TEC-Seq) that allows ultrasensitive direct evaluation of sequence changes in circulating cell-free DNA using massively parallel sequencing. We have used this approach to examine 58 cancer-related genes encompassing 81 kb. Analysis of plasma from 44 healthy individuals identified genomic changes related to clonal hematopoiesis in 16% of asymptomatic individuals but no alterations in driver genes related to solid cancers. Evaluation of 200 patients with colorectal, breast, lung, or ovarian cancer detected somatic mutations in the plasma of 71, 59, 59, and 68%, respectively, of patients with stage I or II disease. Analyses of mutations in the circulation revealed high concordance with alterations in the tumors of these patients. In patients with resectable colorectal cancers, higher amounts of preoperative circulating tumor DNA were associated with disease recurrence and decreased overall survival. These analyses provide a broadly applicable approach for noninvasive detection of early-stage tumors that may be useful for screening and management of patients with cancer.

 Here, we have developed an ultrasensitive approach for direct analysis of sequence alterations in commonly altered cancer genes in cfDNA without prior knowledge of alterations in the tumor. The sensitivity and specificity of the methodology were evaluated in a clinically relevant cohort of healthy individuals and those with early-stage disease in four common cancers. We identified sequence alterations in cell proliferation genes in individuals without cancer, established the sensitivity of the approach for detecting tumor-specific alterations in the plasma of cancer patients, evaluated concordance between plasma and tumor samples from the same patients, and showed that the amounts of ctDNA can serve as a predictive marker of patient outcome. Overall, these analyses provide information on the potential use and limitations of large-scale mutation-based measurements of ctDNA for early diagnosis in common cancers.

 The development of noninvasive liquid biopsy methods based on the analysis of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) provides the opportunity for a new generation of diagnostic approaches. Although cfDNA in the circulation was first described more than 50 years ago ( 10 ), abnormalities in cancer patients were observed only decades later ( 11 , 12 ) and showed that such individuals have higher amounts of cfDNA. In patients with cancer, a fraction of cfDNA is tumor-derived and is termed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). In principle, analysis of ctDNA has the advantage of identifying alterations that are specific to the tumor. The application of next-generation sequencing (NGS), together with advanced computational methods, has recently allowed ctDNA-based tumor genotyping in a variety of cancer types ( 13 – 22 ). However, these approaches have largely been applied in patients with late-stage cancers or have used tumor tissue sequencing to guide mutational analyses in the blood.

 More than 14 million individuals are newly diagnosed with cancer worldwide each year, with the majority having invasive or metastatic disease ( 1 ). It is well established that much of the morbidity and mortality in human cancer is related to the late diagnosis of this disease, where surgical and pharmacologic therapies are less effective ( 2 ). Unfortunately, clinically proven biomarkers that can be used to broadly diagnose and guide patient management early in the course of disease are not available. Serum-based protein biomarkers such as cancer antigen 125, carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), prostate-specific antigen, and cancer antigen 19-9 are commonly used for monitoring cancer patients, but because these proteins are also found in the serum of individuals without cancer, they are typically not useful for disease diagnosis ( 3 – 7 ). Other approaches for early detection of cancer, such as stool-based molecular tests or colonoscopies, are limited to individual tumor types and have challenges in patient compliance ( 8 , 9 ). Currently, no widely applicable biomarkers have been developed for broad detection of human cancer.

 RESULTS

 Targeted error correction sequencing We developed a methodology for comprehensive analysis of sequence alterations in driver genes that are commonly mutated in colorectal, lung, ovarian, breast, and other cancers. Similar to targeted analyses of cancer tissues (23), we first selected genes that were frequently mutated in these tumors and focused our analyses on either the entire coding regions or the most highly mutated exons of these genes. An analysis of the frequency of these alterations in the COSMIC database of somatic mutations in cancer (24) revealed that more than three quarters of patients would be expected to have at least one mutation in 55 genes among the intended cancers as well as other common tumor types (Table 1 and table S1). We hypothesized that a larger panel of genes would increase the probability of detecting at least one gene alteration in the plasma from any given cancer patient. Because alterations in the blood have previously been reported in healthy individuals, we examined three additional genes as well as specific sequence positions in three genes of the 55-gene panel (table S1) that were known to be somatically altered in clonal hematopoietic expansion, myelodysplasia, or other hematological malignancies (25–27). Table 1. Cancer cases containing alterations in driver genes. View this table: Detection of sequence alterations using conventional NGS is limited to a relatively high fraction of mutant to wild-type DNA (>1%) and, as such, is typically not useful for analyses of ctDNA, which may be present in minute amounts in the blood. Although methods have been developed for analysis of ctDNA in late-stage cancer patients (13–21), no method has been systematically applied for analysis of early-stage disease. We developed a custom capture and sequencing approach called targeted error correction sequencing (TEC-Seq) to allow sensitive and specific detection of low-abundance sequence alterations using NGS (Fig. 1). This methodology is based on targeted capture of multiple regions of the genome and deep sequencing (~30,000×) of DNA fragments. The 58 genes analyzed in this study comprised 80,930 captured bases. Specific steps were performed for analysis of rare tumor-specific alterations in DNA molecules and for elimination of potential amplification, sequencing, and contamination errors as well as other sources of alterations in the blood. These included (i) optimizing library generation and capture for conversion of cfDNA for subsequent analyses; (ii) maximizing representation of unique cfDNA molecules analyzed using mapping positions and a small number of prespecified barcodes; (iii) redundant sequencing, where multiple identical DNA molecules are generated and sequenced and any sequence changes are reconciled; (iv) filtering of mapping and sequencing artifacts; and (v) identifying and removing germline and hematopoietic cell proliferation alterations. Fig. 1. Schematic of the TEC-Seq method. cfDNA is extracted from the blood and converted to a genomic library through ligation of a pool containing a small number of dual-index barcode adapters. The resulting cfDNA library is captured and redundantly sequenced to produce multiple duplicates of each DNA fragment. Sequence reconciliation among duplicate fragments identifies alterations present in identical DNA molecules with the same start and end position and exogenous barcodes. Alignment to the reference genome of multiple distinct molecules containing identical redundant changes is used to identify bona fide alterations. Conceptually, the number of genome equivalents analyzed provides a lower limit of detection for any genomic analysis. A high sensitivity approach would aim to maximize the number of unique molecules assessed while allowing for a broad and facile analysis in a range that is above the actual number of fragments present in a biologic sample. We optimized methodologies for extraction and conversion of cfDNA to genomic libraries. Initially, we considered using the start and end genome mapping positions of paired-end sequenced fragments as “endogenous barcodes” to distinguish between individual molecules. However, Monte Carlo simulations suggested that the tight size distribution of cfDNA molecules observed in the plasma would result in a smaller number of possible end mapping combinations and therefore underestimate the true complexity of cfDNA in the circulation (fig. S1). To extend the complexity of endogenous barcodes, we introduced a limited set of sequence indices as “exogenous barcodes” in the initial steps of library generation. Kinde et al. (28) reported the use of a large number of random exogenous barcodes as unique identifiers for analysis of rare mutations in DNA populations. However, simulations with a relatively small number of long prespecified exogenous barcodes (4-16) suggested that these, in combination with endogenous barcodes, would be sufficient to distinguish among different cfDNA molecules in the plasma from a typical blood draw (fig. S1). Extending the number of barcodes substantially beyond this number has the theoretical disadvantage of misassignment among barcodes through sequencing errors and of primer dimers that can form during library formation. We first evaluated the characteristics of the TEC-Seq approach for detecting known tumor-specific alterations from a mixture of DNA from tumor cell lines at different dilutions (ranging from 100 to 0.1%) with unrelated wild-type DNA. Libraries with eight exogenous barcodes were sequenced with an average of ~32,224 sequence reads at each position among the 58 genes analyzed (table S2). We designed thresholds that were expected to identify >99% of alterations with a mutant allele fraction of 0.5% at the anticipated sequencing depth. Alterations were considered if they were present in all copies of multiple sequences of each DNA molecule with identical endogenous and exogenous barcodes and were not removed by additional error filtering steps. Hotspot alterations at positions previously observed to be frequently altered in cancer patients were evaluated with more sensitive thresholds because the a priori probability that these alterations were tumor-derived is higher than that of other alterations. Alterations present in common germline variant databases or in 25% or greater of reads were considered germline and removed from further analysis, unless the mutations were identical to known hotspot alterations or represented truncating mutations in common tumor suppressor genes. Analysis of the altered positions in the dilution samples revealed high concordance to the expected fraction of mutant molecules (r = 0.93; P < 0.0001, Pearson correlation; fig. S2 and table S2), as well as high sensitivity and specificity. The analytical sensitivity was 97.4% overall and 100 and 89% for detecting mutations present at 0.2 and 0.1%, respectively, using minimum thresholds of 0.05% in hotspot positions and 0.1% at all other locations. No false positives were detected over the 80,930 bases analyzed in 38 dilution analyses, resulting in less than one error in 3 million bases sequenced (error rate of <3.3 × 10−7 false-positive mutation calls per base; specificity, >99.9999%; table S2).

 Evaluation of plasma from healthy individuals We used TEC-Seq to examine plasma specimens from 44 healthy individuals (tables S3 and S4). These individuals were not known to have cancer and provided their blood samples as part of a routine cancer screening visit (colonoscopy or Papanicolaou test). Samples were processed within 2 hours from collection and centrifuged twice at high speed to ensure that cells and cellular debris were removed and that only cfDNA was analyzed. From the ~4 ml of plasma obtained from each individual, we generated TEC-Seq libraries and sequenced these to ~30,000-fold coverage. Through these analyses, no mutations were observed in the cancer driver genes analyzed in our panel, consistent with the estimated specificity observed in our dilution analyses. Although conventional sequencing of these samples would have resulted in thousands of putative alterations among the regions analyzed, the TEC-Seq analyses significantly reduced the sequencing error rate to fewer than one false positive per 3 million bases sequenced (<3 × 10−7 false-positive mutation calls per base; P < 0.0001, paired t test; Fig. 2). We compared the TEC-Seq error rate to those obtained through other liquid biopsy analyses. Reanalysis of our sequence data from 15 healthy individuals using the recently developed integrated digital error suppression (iDES) method (19, 21) resulted in multiple false-positive alterations in the healthy cases, consistent with the reported error rate of this approach (21). Fig. 2. TEC-Seq error correction. Sequencing error rates of conventional NGS and theoretical upper limit for TEC-Seq are indicated at each base in the captured regions of interest (P < 0.0001, paired t test). Error rates are determined by identifying the number of alterations at each base (or assuming one alteration per base if no error was identified) divided by the total coverage at each base among the 44 healthy individuals analyzed. Analysis of six genes related to hematopoietic proliferation identified six individuals with a single mutation in their plasma samples, and a seventh individual had two detectable alterations (16% of patients analyzed; table S5). All of the alterations were identified in DNA methyltransferase 3α (DNMT3A), a gene that is clonally altered under preleukemic conditions and myelodysplasia (25–27). Three of the mutations were predicted to result in the R882C change previously observed in clonal hematopoiesis, but other alterations have not been previously reported. These mutations were identified at mutant allele fractions of 0.16 to 5.3%, substantially lower than previous observations in blood cells of healthy individuals (25–27). Our analyses suggest that a higher fraction of asymptomatic individuals may harbor such somatic alterations than had been previously reported through cellular analyses of these genes in the blood.

 Analysis of plasma from patients with cancer We next analyzed plasma samples from 194 patients with breast cancer (n = 45), colorectal cancer (n = 42), lung cancer (n = 65), and ovarian cancer (n = 42). The cohort consisted of untreated patients who had localized or metastatic disease, with most of the patients diagnosed at stages I and II (table S3). We found that the concentration of cfDNA in plasma from cancer patients was ~29 ng/ml, significantly higher than that observed in healthy individuals (average of 7 ng/ml; P = 0.001, unpaired t test; Fig. 3A). In the colorectal cancer cohort, where a larger number of later-stage patients were analyzed, we found that samples from patients with metastatic disease had higher concentration of cfDNA than those from patients with earlier stages of disease (average of 66 ng/ml for stage IV patients versus 21 ng/ml for stages I to III; P = 0.006, unpaired t test; Fig. 3B). Fig. 3. cfDNA and ctDNA in healthy individuals and patients with cancer. Amount of cfDNA extracted from all healthy individuals and patients with different cancer types (A) and from cancer patients of different stages (B). Mutant allele fraction of ctDNA detected in healthy individuals and patients with different cancer types (C) and in cancer patients of different stages (D). Means for each group are represented by the black bars in the columns analyzed. In patients for whom multiple alterations were detected, the highest value is indicated. Clinical characteristics of patients and stages are indicated in table S3. We examined the cfDNA from these patients using the TEC-Seq approach. Of the 194 patients analyzed, more than three quarters of colorectal cancer patients, two-thirds of ovarian cancer patients, and most of the lung and breast cancer patients had detectable alterations in driver genes (Table 2). These detection rates were higher in some cases than the theoretical estimates for these cancer types (Tables 1 and 2). More than three quarters of patients with advanced disease (stages III and IV) and 62% of patients with localized disease (stages I and II) were detected among all tumor types (Table 2). The amounts of ctDNA varied among cancer types, with breast cancer having the lowest mutant allele fraction (P = 0.028, unpaired t test; Fig. 3C). Similar to observations of cfDNA, the amounts of ctDNA were higher in metastatic disease compared to earlier-stage disease among all cancer types (P < 0.0001, unpaired t test; Figs. 3D and 4). Eighty of 128 detected cases had at least one alteration in a gene hotspot position (Fig. 4). The affected genes and distribution of alterations for each tumor type were similar to common driver gene alterations that have previously been reported in these cancers (fig. S3). On average, 2.1 alterations, including 0.9 changes at hotspot positions, were observed in each patient with detectable ctDNA, with lung and colorectal cancers having a higher number of alterations per case (Fig. 4). By limiting analysis only to a specific set of hotspot variants as others have reported (21), the fraction of cases detected was reduced to 56% of those identified by TEC-Seq. These observations highlight the benefit of analyzing a broader panel of driver gene regions to increase the possibility of detecting tumor-specific alterations in the plasma. Table 2. Cancer patients detected using TEC-Seq. NA, not applicable. View this table: Fig. 4. ctDNA in patients with breast, colorectal, lung, and ovarian cancer. Patients (n = 194) are each represented by a tick mark. (Left) Bar chart shows the number of alterations detected for each case. (Middle) Stage, cancer type, and histopathological subtype are represented by colored vertical bars. (Right) Mutant allele fractions for each alteration detected per patient are indicated with an “x” at the mean. Alterations are colored on the basis of hotspot status and whether any alterations were detected in the case.

 Comparison of mutations in plasma with those in matched tumor and blood cells Of the 194 patients in our study, 152 cases had matched tumor and normal tissues that we analyzed using an independent targeted NGS approach (tables S3 and S4). We examined these cases to determine whether the mutations identified in the plasma were tumor-specific or may have originated during blood cell expansion. The plasma analyses performed using TEC-Seq were performed separately and did not rely on any knowledge of alterations identified through these parallel tissue analyses. We detected 87 changes in the circulation of 194 patients at allele fractions >25% and considered these to be likely germline variants. Analysis of 63 of these variants in the available corresponding blood cells identified all these changes to be germline (table S6). These observations suggested that cfDNA can be used to accurately identify germline changes in the context of tumor-derived and blood cell proliferation alterations and, similarly, that this approach can be used to distinguish these changes from somatic alterations. Similar to our observations in healthy individuals, we identified alterations in DNMT3A and five other genes involved in blood cell proliferation in the plasma of cancer patients (table S5). The fraction of patients with detectable changes in these genes correlated with age, as previously observed (P = 0.013, unpaired t test) (25–27). Unlike tumor-specific alterations, the allele fractions of blood cell proliferation alterations in cfDNA were similar among healthy individuals and patients with cancer, regardless of stage. Analysis of matched white blood cells from individuals with alterations in these genes identified the corresponding mutation in most of the cases, consistent with the notion that the alterations in cfDNA originated from these cells (table S5). After accounting for blood cell proliferation and germline alterations, we identified 313 candidate tumor-specific changes in the plasma samples from 128 of the 194 patients analyzed. We further evaluated 216 of these alterations in 100 patients where matched tumor tissue and blood cells were available. We found that 155 of the 216 (72%) alterations were identical in both plasma and tumor samples (Fig. 5). Among stage III and IV patients, 65 of 84 (77%) variants were concordant, whereas for early-stage patients, 90 of 132 (68%) alterations were concordant. In line with these observations, we found that 70 of the 75 (93%) alterations with a mutant allele fraction >1% in the plasma were detected in the tumor tissue of the same individual. Overall, 82 of the 100 (82%) patients had at least one alteration observed in the circulation that was identical to that in the tumor specimen. Fig. 5. Concordance between alterations in plasma and tissue. Mutant allele fractions observed in the plasma are indicated for each alteration identified with a black bar at the mean. The presence of alterations in matched tumor specimens is indicated with green dots, whereas nonconcordant alterations are indicated in orange, and those that are not assessed are indicated in gray. Stage and cancer type for each patient are plotted in the two horizontal tracks at the bottom of the figure. To evaluate reproducibility of the approach between separate blood draws in the same patients, we assessed six late-stage patients with lung cancer where blood was obtained early during the course of treatment. These patients were undergoing treatment but were observed to have progressive or stable disease. Despite the difference in time between the blood draws, we found that 90% of the alterations observed in the second blood draw were present at the time of the first blood draw (17 of 19 alterations), with one patient having no alterations at both time points (fig. S4). All alterations present with a mutant allele fraction ≥1% were observed at both time points. In a subset of colorectal cancer patients, we evaluated whether the observations we detected in the plasma could be independently confirmed using droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR), a method that is highly sensitive for detection of single-base substitutions (29). We examined six driver alterations detected in the plasma: two that were also detected in matched tumors and four that were absent. Five of the six driver alterations were detected in the plasma by ddPCR at levels similar to those observed by TEC-Seq (fig. S5A). Those not detected in tumors by targeted sequencing were similarly not identified through ddPCR approaches. We also evaluated 10 mutations that corresponded to the most common changes in KRAS, PIK3CA, and BRAF that we detected in these tumors but were not present in the plasma of these patients. Although we confirmed that these alterations were in the tumors of these patients, we found that those not detected by TEC-Seq analyses remained undetected by ddPCR in the plasma, presumably because the amounts of ctDNA corresponding to these alterations were extremely low in these patients (fig. S5B). To assess the possibility that tumor heterogeneity may be responsible for the apparent lack of concordance between specific alterations in the plasma and those in the tumor, we analyzed multiple tumor sites from colorectal cancer patient CGCRC307 using ddPCR. We characterized 10 different regions of the tumor as well as a subsequent metastatic site for an R201C alteration in the GNAS gene that we detected in the plasma but not in the tumor of this patient. Although we found a BRAF V600E alteration in all samples analyzed, the GNAS R201C substitution was not detected in the original tumor biopsy but was detected as a subclonal change in only a portion of the primary tumor, suggesting that it developed later in tumorigenesis (fig. S6). The GNAS R201C change identified had been previously reported in colorectal cancers (30) and has been shown to promote intestinal tumorigenesis through activation of both Wnt and ERK pathways (31). Consistent with this notion, we found the GNAS alteration to be clonal in the metastatic lesion that was identified 2 years after the primary tumor in this patient (fig. S6). These results suggest that plasma alterations not detected in the matched tumor specimens may represent bona fide somatic mutations in ctDNA derived from heterogeneous primary or occult lesions. ||||| By Dennis Thompson

 HealthDay Reporter

 (HealthDay)

 WEDNESDAY, Aug. 16, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- A new genetic blood test might pave the way for detecting early stage cancers that often prove fatal when caught too late, a new study suggests.

 The test scans blood for DNA fragments released by cancerous tumors, explained lead researcher Dr. Victor Velculescu.

 By reviewing these DNA fragments for mutations found in 58 "cancer-driver" genes, the blood test detects many early stage cancers without rendering false positives for healthy people, said Velculescu, co-director of cancer biology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, in Baltimore.

 The test detected stage 1 or 2 colon, breast, lung or ovarian cancers between 59 percent and 71 percent of the time when assessing 200 patients previously diagnosed with cancer, researchers found.

 "If we are able to detect cancer earlier, our chances of saving lives would be much higher," Velculescu said. "The survival difference between late-stage and early stage disease in these cancers accounts for over a million lives worldwide each year."

 The test also proved capable of screening out cancer-free people.

 Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, called this "important research" that "moves us one step further down the path to developing a blood test that might find cancer earlier."

 "We still need to improve the sensitivity, but this is a step forward. It is a proof of concept," Lichtenfeld said. "It is not a test that's going to be available in a clinical laboratory anytime soon."

 To develop a genetic blood test for cancer, researchers must find ways to spot DNA mutations linked to cancer while ignoring natural and harmless mutations that regularly occur in humans, Velculescu explained.

 Velculescu and his team developed a genetic scan that essentially "takes a fragment here and a fragment there and uses it to create a picture of what the tumor DNA looks like," Lichtenfeld said. "That's what makes it so elegant."

 The research team assembled a panel of 58 cancer-linked genes, and used their scan to look for tumor DNA fragments in the blood of 200 people known to have cancer.

 Overall, researchers detected about 62 percent of stage 1 and 2 cancers.

 The test specifically spotted early stage colon cancer 71 percent of the time, breast and lung cancer 59 percent of the time, and ovarian cancer 68 percent of the time.

 The ability to catch early stage ovarian cancer is particularly needed, Lichtenfeld said. Fewer than one in five ovarian cancers are caught early, when the five-year survival rate is greater than 90 percent. Most are detected after they've spread, and by then the odds of five-year survival are 40 percent or less, he said.

 "Finding any marker in a stage 1 ovarian cancer patient is very important, because this is a tumor that usually presents at a much later stage," Lichtenfeld said.

 The researchers also directly tested cancerous tissue removed from half of the 200 cancer patients. They found that 82 percent of the tumors contained mutations that correlated with DNA fragments found in the person's blood.

 To check the blood test's ability to weed out healthy people, the researchers also analyzed blood from 44 volunteers without cancer. No false positives occurred.

 That equates to less than one false positive for more than 3.5 million letters of DNA sequenced, since each separate test requires assessment of 80,000 DNA base pairs associated with the 58-gene screening panel, Velculescu said.

 Despite these promising results, researchers need to validate the blood test in larger studies, Velculescu said.

 More work also needs to be done to improve the detection rate, Lichtenfeld added. "These tests were not able to detect 100 percent of the cancers," he said.

 Finally, cancer doctors must discuss what will be done when technology evolves to the point that such tests regularly find tumors that aren't life-threatening, Lichtenfeld said. In some cases, treatment to remove the cancer could be worse than leaving it alone.

 "What's going to be so important is to be able to distinguish cancers that will hurt people versus cancers that may not have long-term impact on survival," Lichtenfeld said.

 The report appears in the Aug. 16 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

 More information

 For more on the genetics of cancer, visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute. ||||| CHICAGO (Reuters) - A test that scans blood for tumor-specific DNA identified early-stage cancer in more than half of 138 patients with the disease, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday, marking a new milestone in the rush for so-called “liquid biopsies.”

 Several companies already offer tests that can detect cancer DNA in the blood of patients with late-stage cancers. Such tests are used to help guide treatment or identify whether cancers have returned after surgery.

 Researchers behind the early-stage test hope it could be used to identify cancers at a stage when patients have a better chance at survival.

 “To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies that has looked directly at early-stage cancers,” said Dr Victor Velculescu, professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, whose study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

 In making the test, the challenge was to identify rare DNA from real cancers while ignoring other types of genetic alterations that can occur as blood cells divide or genetic alterations that people are born with.

 For the study, the team screened blood samples from patients with breast, lung, ovarian and colorectal cancers, looking for 58 genes typically linked with these cancers. Overall, they were able to detect 86 out of 138 stage I and stage II cancers. They also sequenced mutations in tumors from 100 of the patients studied, and found that in 82 patients, the same mutations found in the blood corresponded with those found in the tumor tissue.

 They also tried the test on 44 healthy patients, and showed it did not detect any cancer-derived mutations.

 Velculescu said more studies would be needed in much larger populations to prove the test can safely and accurately identify early-stage cancers, a process that could take up to five years.

 The hope, he said, is that it would identify cancers at a stage when patients have a better chance at survival. First uses of the technology would be in patients at high risk for developing cancer, such as heavy smokers, he said.

 In addition to being a researcher at Johns Hopkins, Velculescu is a co-founder of Personal Genome Diagnostics, a private liquid biopsy company. The study was done by Johns Hopkins researchers, he said.

 In June, Grail, a spinoff from gene sequencer maker Illumina, presented a feasibility study for its liquid biopsy test at American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. In that study, researchers analyzed tissue and blood from patients with advanced cancers. Grail is also pursuing early-stage cancer detection. |||||


– Cavities are far from a modern woe, reveals a new study of a 5,300-year-old "ice mummy." "Ötzi" didn't just have the bad luck of dying on a glacier, he also suffered from terrible teeth, reports Science. Though his remains were discovered on the Austro-Italian border in 1991, his teeth had never been assessed. Researchers circled back to a CAT scan taken in 2005 to review his "oral cavity" and "study evolutionary aspects of oral disease," per their abstract in the European Journal of Oral Sciences. What they determined, as translated from dental-speak ("the poor periodontal condition of the Iceman's dentition, eg, loss of alveolar bone...") by Science: a discolored front tooth as the result of some sort of accident, a broken molar, cavities, and gum disease. A diet involving gruel may have been responsible for the latter two conditions. In fact, the researchers believe that the rise of starches in the diets of the time may be linked to a corresponding increase in cavities.

Expand this summary.

Credit: (left) UZH; (right) 120/Creative Commons

 Europe's best-known mummy wasn't just a medical mess; he also had terrible teeth, according to a new study. Ötzi (inset photo), a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities. His teeth, back and front, were also heavily worn from chewing coarse grain and use as a "third hand" for gripping tools and cutting. When Ötzi was discovered atop a glacier on the Austro-Italian border, his frozen corpse was intensively studied. But no one took a close look at his teeth until now. Using 3D computer tomography (a CAT scan), the hunter's mouth could be examined for clues as to the life he led. The results, published this week in the European Journal of Oral Sciences, suggest that Ötzi didn't have it easy. A fall or other accident killed one of his front teeth, still discolored millennia later. And he may have had a small stone, gone unnoticed in his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. (An arrow on the right in CAT scan above marks places where the bone is eaten away by infection, the left arrow points at deep cavities.) In the late Stone Age, humans were increasingly incorporating coarsely ground grain into their diets. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since.

 See more ScienceShots. ||||| Few of our ancestors have been so thoroughly poked and prodded as Neolithic Tyrolean Iceman "Ötzi," discovered melting out of an Alpine glacier in 1991. Researchers have probed his stomach and bowels for traces of his last meal and analyzed his teeth for cavities. Now, an international team has sequenced his entire genome, and it turns out Ötzi still has some surprises in store.

 Earlier computer scans had revealed Ötzi's severe arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. But the new analysis shows that Ötzi had a genetic predisposition to the condition, despite the fact that as a hunter-gatherer he had none of what are currently believed to be the relevant risk factors, such as being overweight, getting too little exercise, and smoking or drinking. "This new data suggests that we might be less able to prevent arteriosclerosis than we believed," notes cardiologist and mummy expert Gregory Thomas of the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the new work.

 The whole genome sequencing also reveals more about Ötzi's ancestors. Earlier research analyzed Ötzi's mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through only the female line, but had found few known matches among modern populations. Now sequencing of his Y chromosome places him in the rare G2A4 haplogroup, meaning that his paternal genes are linked to a population that left the Near East for Europe at the beginning of the Neolithic era, roughly 1000 years before Ötzi himself lived.

 Ötzi's genetic profile marks him as being most closely related to small populations currently living in the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, as well as some of the more remote areas of Georgia and Russia, says geneticist Angela Graefen of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, one of the principal researchers on the paper. That doesn't mean that Ötzi was Sardinian or Corsican, Graefen notes, but that those populations may be the closest living genetic matches to the hunter-gatherers who originally migrated into Europe.

 The genome analysis, published this week in Nature Communications, also helps flesh out our picture of Ötzi the man: Researchers now know he had brown eyes, brown hair, type-O blood, and shared the lactose intolerance that was then still the norm among Neolithic Europeans. He was also the first known carrier of Lyme disease: the sequencing yielded genes from the disease-causing Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium. Although scientists can't know whether Lyme disease actually made Ötzi sick during his lifetime, the discovery of 60% of a B. burgdorferi genome from a Neolithic carrier shows that this pathogen has plagued humans for thousands of years. Until researchers compare the B. burgdorferi genome from Ötzi with more modern incarnations of the pathogen, they won't have a clear picture of how Lyme disease evolves. "But depending on the research other scientists are doing over the next few years, we could be gaining a lot more insights from Ötzi's genome," Graefen says.

 The new paper adds to our knowledge of Neolithic life, says mummy expert Frank Ruehli of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "Of course Ötzi is only one individual, but he's a very well-preserved, well-described individual, whom we have a lot of additional information about already. So this is an important step." |||||


Here is a news article: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)

 Not long before the children’s movie “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” sets sail, you might find yourself hoping for a nor’easter to come and blow this latest and perhaps last installment in the screen version of C.S. Lewis ’s series, far, far away. But where would it go? Both Never Land and Wonderland are occupied, courtesy of the Walt Disney Company, which helped produce the first “Narnia” movies, the fairly diverting “Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the disappointing “Prince Caspian.” Now 20th Century Fox has taken up the franchise with largely dreary results.

 The series has a new director, the generally reliable Michael Apted, who established his rapport with wee ones years ago with “7 Up!,” the first in a documentary series that has revisited the same group of British men and women in new movies every seven years since 1964, when the participants were squirmy 7-year-olds. Though Mr. Apted brings a few minor idiosyncrasies to “Dawn Treader” — notably with his riskily off-putting direction of the young actor Will Poulter, a “Narnia” newcomer — a strong filmmaking voice was clearly not called for in an entertainment that has been carefully calibrated for maximum blandness. Mr. Apted is aboard to keep the franchise sailing along or at least afloat, which he does.

 Mr. Poulter is by far the most unexpected ingredient in the new adventure, primarily because his aggressive, chatterbox performance digs under your skin, which, as it turns out, is what makes it finally work. First seen in the independent film “Son of Rambow,” Mr. Poulter here plays Eustace Scrubb, a cousin of Lucy and Edmund Pevensie (Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes), who, with their brother Peter and sister Susan discovered Narnia. Three books and several years later, Britain is still at war, and Lucy and Edmund are squirreled away with Eustace’s family, to his loquacious displeasure. As he greedily hoards his sweets and mutters invectives, you can see the next Mike Leigh misanthrope being born before your eyes.

 He keeps up the grumbling even after a maritime painting on a wall turns into a Niagara Falls, flooding a bedroom with imaginative computer-generated water and sweeping him, Lucy and Edmund out to sea. They’re soon rescued by their old comrade in arms, King Caspian (Ben Barnes), who is manning the Dawn Treader with a squeaky clean crew of men and talking beasts, including an armed (and tailed) mouse-kateer, Reepicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg). Backslapping and strained comic bits ensue, including a sword fight between a disbelieving Eustace and Reepicheep, a kind of furry Jiminy Cricket but without the mellifluous pipes. The ship makes a few pit stops on enchanted islands, amid boatloads of exposition, which reinforce the sense that it’s a long way before the series will drop anchor.

 It remains to be seen whether we’ll get there — there are four more books — though it would help if a better balance were struck between the actors, most of whom could use a firmer hand, and the special effects. (This one comes in 3-D, a wasted effort.) Though there are times when the movie turns into a congested mess, as in a climactic battle that washes the screen in gray, there are moments when you also see a quieter, less industrial production. Such is the case after Eustace is turned into a grand, ungainly, unhappy dragon. When he lies forlornly on a beach, or as forlornly as dragons do, and a monstrous-size tear slides down his scaly face, you don’t just see the wizardry magic, you also see the human touch behind it.

 “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” is rated PG. Parental guidance suggested but not essential.

 THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA

 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 Opens on Friday nationwide.

 Directed by Michael Apted; written by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and Michael Petroni, based on the book by C. S. Lewis; director of photography, Dante Spinotti; edited by Rick Shaine; music by David Arnold; production design by Barry Robison; costumes by Isis Mussenden; produced by Mark Johnson, Andrew Adamson and Philip Steuer; released by Fox 2000 Pictures and Walden Media. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.

 WITH: Georgie Henley (Lucy Pevensie), Skandar Keynes (Edmund Pevensie), Ben Barnes (Caspian), Will Poulter (Eustace Scrubb), Liam Neeson (Voice of Aslan), Simon Pegg (Voice of Reepicheep) and Tilda Swinton (The White Witch). ||||| The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 'Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' review: Generic faith-based message bores

 Everett Collection 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' stars Ben Barnes L.), Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley.

 Third adventure in C.S. Lewis' fantasy series. With Georgie Henley, Ben Barnes. Director: Michael Apted (1:55). PG: Scary

 action sequences. At area theaters.

 It's inevitable the "Chronicles of Narnia" films will be compared to a certain other epic series, but as "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" reminds us, the Pevensie family is always destined to come in second to Harry and Hermione.

 These days, a big-screen franchise needs characters fans can continue to connect with. But unlike J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis, who wrote his novels in the 1950s, lacked long-term marketing skills. So now, every time we return to Narnia, we're met with new faces, even while scanning the horizon for familiar ones.

 Hollywood noted this problem when the second Narnia film underperformed. So a big deal has been made about the return of Tilda Swinton's villainous White Witch -- but her ghostly, barely-there cameo simply leaves us wanting more. The same is true for the older Pevensie siblings, who are awkwardly shoved into silly flashbacks.

 Our real tour guides are little Lucy (Georgie Henley), her big brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and their spoiled cousin, Eustace (Will Poulter). When Narnia is threatened by an evil force that radiates from a mysterious island, the kids -- joined by Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), the mouse Reepicheep (Simon Pegg) and several recent recruits -- must locate and destroy it.

 Henley is as adorable as ever, Poulter is a comic find, and Barnes has loosened up considerably since the last installment. The action scenes, while not especially striking, do have a game energy. But whether you compare this chapter to any "Harry Potter" or even to the first, majestic "Narnia" film, it's hard to avoid the absences at its core.

 Neither director Michael Apted nor his three screenwriters connect with the deeply human emotions that propel the best fantasies. Instead, they're required to prioritize generic, faith-based messages whose blandness can't be disguised by Liam Neeson's emphatic turn as the Christ-like lion, Aslan.

 Kids, of course, are unlikely to get the religious allusions. All they'll see is a decent family adventure, perfectly suited to a cold Saturday morning -- and likely to be forgotten by Sunday. ||||| The "faith group," as director Michael Apted has referred to the Christian moviegoing base that helped turn "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" into a worldwide success, may have felt snubbed by the frenetic second film in the series, "Prince Caspian." The first made $745 million; the second, a pleasant-sounding but unprofitable $420 million, owing to the hundreds of millions involved in production and marketing.The new "Narnia" chronicle, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," does not take either the faith group or the faithless group for granted. It strikes an artful balance between allegorical religious concerns and escapist ones. I enjoyed "The Dawn Treader" more than its predecessors, simply because at his best, Apted, the new director (though hardly a new director), knows how to put together a high-buck commodity more interestingly than did Andrew Adamson, the man behind the camera for the first two and a producer of the third.The Christian overtones are there. But now that the crucifixion's out of the way (in the first one) and the effects-heavy bombast (of the second) has been held in check, the results should please a fairly wide audience swath.The ad campaign steers "The Dawn Treader" as close to the dark threats of " Harry Potter " and "The Lord of the Rings" as possible, and the screenwriters pull bits and characters from other C.S. Lewis "Narnia" novels to provide both continuity and spice. It's 1943. With Peter off studying for his university entrance exams and Susan off in America, the story centers on Lucy ( Georgie Henley ) and Edmund ( Skandar Keynes ), stuck in Cambridge, living with their insufferable snot of a cousin, Eustace (Will Poulter).Instead of a wardrobe, the magical portal to Narnia is a painting of the sailing vessel The Dawn Treader, storm-tossed and ready for its close-up. Suddenly the painting starts gushing and the three kids find themselves underwater, then in Narnian high seas, where they are rescued handily by good King Caspian ( Ben Barnes ) and the swashbuckling mouse, Reepicheep, voiced by Simon Pegg . The Pevensie siblings and their unpleasant cousin begin their search for the seven lost Lords of Temmar, exploring five separate and differently cursed islands, securing the seven Lords' swords and restoring peace to Narnia. The region's guiding light remains Aslan the lion ( Liam Neeson , whose voice comes with a special "deity" setting). As he himself notes, Aslan goes by a different name in the "other" world.The film's otherworldly effects include one-footed Caliban-types, in thrall to the Prospero-like magician Coriakin and more interestingly a slithering green mist that preys upon our heroes' and heroines' insecurities and vanity, like a fog machine weaned on too many episodes of "Glee."Apted's brisk, pace-y way with a story rarely takes time for contemplation, but the episodic nature of Lewis' narrative transfers easily and well to the screen. I found the depth of field in the 3D version of "The Dawn Treader" to be quite impressive, especially on the waves (though more sensitive stomachs may object). Henley and Keynes remain more easygoing than dynamic; then again, there's enough showbiz gushing from Poulter's Eustace for several "Narnia" installments. The savvy but relentless young performer appears to have studied at the Jack "Artful Dodger" Wild School of Aggressive Hamming. Just when you've had it with him, though, Lewis and his adapters allow the foil to learn a lesson or two and grow into his better, more mature self. This is a development both the faith group and the heathens can appreciate, and "The Dawn Treader" doesn't so much reinvent the "Narnia" franchise as do what's needed, and expected, with a little more zip than the previous voyages.: PG (for some frightening images and sequences of fantasy action): Georgie Henley (Lucy); Skandar Keynes (Edmund); Ben Barnes (Caspian); Will Poulter (Eustace); Simon Pegg (voice of Reepicheep the mouse); Liam Neeson (voice of Aslan the lion): Directed by Michael Apted; written by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and Michael Petroni, based on the novel by C.S. Lewis; produced by Andrew Adamson, Mark Johnson and Philip Steuer. A Twentieth Century Fox release. Running time: 1:52. |||||
A summary of this is?

– Critics aren’t enthralled by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader the third film based on CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. (Its Rotten Tomatoes rating is 51%.) But there are some bright spots: Manohla Dargis calls the film “largely dreary” in the New York Times. Still, “though there are times when the movie turns into a congested mess, there are moments when you also see a quieter, less industrial production.” The film reminds us” that “the Pevensie family is always destined to come in second to Harry and Hermione,” writes Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. It fails to “connect with the deeply human emotions that propel the best fantasies.” But at the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips has some kind words: the film, which “strikes an artful balance between allegorical religious concerns and escapist ones,” beats out its predecessors.


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FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Drivers in California can legally read a map on their hand-held cellphones while behind the wheel, a state appeals court ruled Thursday.

 The 5th District Court of Appeal reversed the case of a Fresno man who was ticketed in January 2012 for looking at a map on his iPhone 4 while stuck in traffic. The driver, Steven Spriggs, challenged the $165 fine.

 But Spriggs said he's no champion of those who think they can get away with cruising down the road while staring at their phone or engaging in other such dangerous behavior. Spriggs would like the law that ensnared him to be rewritten so officers can do their job unencumbered.

 "We're distracted all the time," he said. "If our distractions cause us to drive erratically, we should be arrested for driving erratically."

 It's personal for Spriggs, whose son suffered a broken leg from a driver who was chatting on a cellphone. Spriggs said he uses a hands-free device to talk and drive.

 The incident that ensnared Spriggs happened when he was stopped by roadwork. He had grabbed his cellphone to find an alternate route when a California Highway Patrol officer on a motorcycle spotted him and wrote the ticket.

 Spriggs first challenged the case in traffic court, where he lost, and then appealed it himself to a three-judge panel in Fresno County Superior Court, where he lost a second time.

 Determined that the law didn't apply to him, Spriggs took it to the appellate court, but this time with help of a law firm that stepped in to represent him pro bono.

 In their 18-page ruling, the appellate judges said California's law that prohibits people from talking on their cellphones without a hands-free device could have been written more clearly, but it doesn't apply to looking at maps on cellphones. The law the CHP officer used to ticket Spriggs applies specifically to people "listening and talking" on cellphones, not using their mobile phone in other ways, the court said.

 Texting while driving remains illegal under another California law passed after the one at issue in Spriggs' case.

 Attorney Scott Reddie, who represented Spriggs, said it's now up to the state attorney general's office to decide if it will challenge Thursday's ruling to the California Supreme Court, which is choosy about which cases it hears. Nicholas Pacilio, a spokesman for Attorney General Kamala Harris, said the office is reviewing the ruling.

 Neither Reddie nor Pacilio were familiar with other states that prohibit drivers from looking at cellphone map applications.

 Spriggs, who is entitled to recoup his $165 fine, said the Superior Court judges who had upheld his violation were guilty of overreaching by applying the spotty law to him. He hopes that California legislators will now revisit the issue and fix it.

 "They're going to have to do something," he said. "I just hope they take a look at the big picture." ||||| It's illegal in California to talk or text on a handheld cell phone while driving. But it's OK to pick up your phone and look at a map to see where you're going and how to get there.

 That was the message Thursday from a state appeals court in Fresno, which threw out a driver's traffic ticket and $165 fine for using a map app in a traffic jam.

 In a 2006 state law, the Legislature responded to concerns about distracted driving "by prohibiting drivers from engaging in conversations while holding the telephone in one's hand rather than prohibiting all hand-held uses of the telephone," said the Fifth District Court of Appeal.

 The ruling is the first appellate interpretation of a 2006 state law that restricts handheld uses of a mobile telephone while driving. The ruling will have statewide impact if it withstands further appeals.

 The driver, Steven Spriggs of Fresno, was stuck in freeway traffic on Highway 41 in January 2012 and pulled out his iPhone for a map to find another route. A Highway Patrol officer saw him holding the phone and pulled him over.

 Spriggs challenged his ticket, but lower courts agreed with prosecutors that the law forbids all use of handheld phones. On Thursday, the appeals court said that's an unreasonable interpretation of the statute's language and history.

 Because the law specifies that a phone should be used in a way that "allows hands-free listening and talking," its evident target was hands-on conversations and not other uses, said Justice Herbert Levy in the 3-0 ruling. Otherwise, he said, it might be illegal to hold the phone in your hand to check the time "or even to move it for use as a paperweight."

 He quoted then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said in a press release after signing the bill in 2006 that "it's dangerous to talk on your cell phone while driving."

 Levy also noted that the Legislature later passed a law that prohibits using a cell phone to send or receive a text message while driving, unless the phone is entirely voice-activated. That law would have been unnecessary, he said, if the 2006 statute already prohibited all handheld uses.

 Another state law bars drivers under 18 from using any type of cell phone.

 Spriggs' lawyer, Scott Reddie, praised the ruling. Asked whether it might promote distracted driving, he declined to comment, but said, "If the state wants to broaden the law, they can write new legislation."

 The state could appeal to the California Supreme Court. |||||

– Using a smartphone to look a map while driving is allowed under the California law that bans motorists from talking or texting on a handheld phone, an appeals court has decided. The court sided with Steven Spriggs, who was fined $165 after a highway patrol officer spotted him looking at a map on his iPhone while stuck in freeway traffic, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The court noted that the law was enacted in 2006, a year before the first iPhone came out. The judges decided that the law only applied to conversations, and interpreting it otherwise would make it illegal to look at the time on a phone "or even to move it for use as a paperweight." Spriggs says the law should be written more clearly, adding that his son suffered a broken leg from a driver who was chatting on his phone and he definitely doesn't approve of distracted driving. "We're distracted all the time," he tells the AP. "If our distractions cause us to drive erratically, we should be arrested for driving erratically."


Summarize this article:

These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| Crews work to repair damages to the Burger King in Morro Bay. (KSBY)

 A Morro Bay Burger King is expected to reopen Tuesday morning at 6:30 after police say a prank call about a fake gas leak apparently prompted employees to smash all the windows.

 On Monday, workers were repairing the estimated $35,000 worth of damages. The fast food chain on Quintana Road has been closed since Sunday.

 According to police, employees received a call Saturday night from someone pretending to be from the fire department, telling them to ventilate the business. That prompted employees to smash the windows.

 The manager on duty even used a car to ram into the building. The owner of the fast food restaurant says that person has since been suspended.

 Anyone with information, pictures or video of the incident is encouraged to call the Morro Bay Police Department at (805) 772-6225 or Det. Mark Martin at (805) 772-6233. |||||

– Employees at a California Burger King responded less than ideally to a prank call Saturday night, causing $35,000 in damage to the restaurant, KSBY reports. According to the San Luis Obispo Tribune, someone called the Burger King in Morro Bay pretending to be with the fire department. They told employees there was a gas leak and they needed to break out the restaurant's windows immediately for ventilation. The employees apparently did as they were told, with the shift manager going so far as to ram a car into the restaurant. The manager has been suspended, and police are continuing to investigate the incident. Officials remind residents that the fire department will rarely call you directly about an emergency.


Article:
President Trump's friend, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, started a media storm Monday evening when he told PBS's Judy Woodruff that Trump was "considering perhaps terminating the special counsel" Robert Mueller, who is overseeing the Russia investigation.

 "I think he's weighing that option," Ruddy said.

 Between the lines: Ruddy never actually spoke to Trump about firing Mueller, a source close to Ruddy tells me, but was reading between the lines of what others had said. Indeed, Ruddy referred to comments from Jay Sekulow, one of Trump's lawyers, who didn't rule out that Trump might fire Mueller in an appearance Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

 Sean Spicer confirmed Trump hadn't discussed the matter with Ruddy: "Mr. Ruddy never spoke to the President regarding this issue. With respect to this subject, only the President or his attorneys are authorized to comment." ||||| Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Tuesday said he has not seen good cause to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian election interference.

 Rosenstein clarified at a Senate Appropriations Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee hearing that he, and not Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsBudowsky: Senate must protect Mueller from Barr, President Trump Feinstein grappling with vote on AG nominee Barr Central American women fleeing domestic violence deserve refugee status MORE, has the authority to hire and fire Mueller.

 “Have you seen good cause for firing Mueller?” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen Cynthia (Jeanne) Jeanne ShaheenGOP reasserts NATO support after report on Trump’s wavering Some Senate Dems see Ocasio-Cortez as weak spokeswoman for party The Hill's Morning Report — Trump eyes wall money options as shutdown hits 21 days MORE (D-N.H.) asked Rosenstein.

 “I have not,” he replied.

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 Rosenstein added he is confident Mueller will have sufficient independence in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia.

 Sen. Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsCentrist efforts to convince Trump to end shutdown falter On The Money: Shutdown Day 26 | Pelosi calls on Trump to delay State of the Union | Cites 'security concerns' | DHS chief says they can handle security | Waters lays out agenda | Senate rejects effort to block Trump on Russia sanctions Senators look for possible way to end shutdown MORE (R-Maine) further pressed him on reports that the administration is considering firing Mueller, asking whether he would if President Trump ordered him to do so.

 “I am not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate,” Rosenstein said, explaining that under federal regulations, Mueller can only be fired for good cause and that reason would have to be put in writing.

 Democrats slammed Sessions on Tuesday for canceling plans to testify at the hearing and sending Rosenstein in his place.

 “You are not the witness we were supposed to hear from today,” Sen. Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph LeahyGOP insiders knock their depictions in new Dick Cheney biopic ‘Vice’ Barr: It would be a crime for president to pardon someone in exchange for their silence Barr says Trump won't be allowed to 'correct' Mueller report MORE (D-Vt.) said. “You are not the witness that was supposed to be behind the table.” ||||| Sessions never should've recused himself. Now that we know TRUMP IS NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION, Sessions should take it back & fire Mueller. ||||| Robert Mueller was appointed by the Justice Department last month to investigate Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. | Getty Trump attorney won't rule out firing Mueller

 One of President Donald Trump’s attorneys on Sunday wouldn't rule out the possibility the president would fire the special counsel appointed to look into his campaign’s potential ties to Russia.

 Robert Mueller was appointed by the Justice Department last month to investigate Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. And on Sunday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Trump attorney Jay Sekulow whether the president would pledge not to interfere or order the attorney general to fire Mueller.

 Story Continued Below

 “Look, the president of the United States, as we all know, is a unitary executive,” Sekulow said on ABC’s “This Week.” “But the president is going to seek the advice of his counsel and inside the government as well as outside. And I'm not going to speculate on what he will, or will not, do.”

 Sekulow said he “can’t imagine” the issue would arise, but “that, again, is an issue that the president with his advisers would discuss if there was a basis.” ||||| Donald Trump is considering dismissing the special counsel assigned to the Russia investigation, a confidant said on Monday.

 Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy told PBS Newshour that Trump is “considering perhaps terminating” Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who was appointed to run the investigation into Russian influence on the campaign by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on May 17.

 Asked later if Trump is really considering firing Mueller, Ruddy said: “Yes.”

 A White House official told me that “Chris was speaking for himself and did not speak to the president.” Later on Monday night, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer issued a statement reading, “Mr. Ruddy never spoke to the president regarding this issue. With respect to this subject, only the president or his attorneys are authorized to comment.”

 CNBC’s Washington correspondent tweeted that she had seen Ruddy leaving the West Wing earlier on Monday afternoon; NBC later reported that he was there for a meeting with the president that was postponed. Ruddy told NPR they spoke on Friday.

 Ruddy, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, has often seemed to float trial balloons related to moves Trump is considering making. In February, after having a drink the night before with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Ruddy criticized White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on CNN, saying "I think Reince Priebus, good guy, well-intentioned, but he clearly doesn't know how the federal agencies work.” ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. |||||Summary:

– Christopher Ruddy is seen as a confidante of President Trump, so his assertion on PBS on Monday that Trump might fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller is drawing a lot of attention. It wasn't exactly a firm statement, with the Newsmax CEO saying that Trump is "considering perhaps terminating" Mueller, who is looking into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. He added: "I think he's weighing that option." That prompted a quick response from White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who said that Ruddy "never spoke to the president regarding this issue" and that "only the president or his attorneys are authorized to comment.” Related coverage: Who's Ruddy? The Los Angeles Times has a quick bio of the longtime Trump pal that explains why he's generally a reliable gauge on what Trump is thinking. Trial balloon? That Atlantic speculates that Ruddy could be deliberately floating the idea to see how it flies, noting that he's done so previously with, among other things, statements in regard to Reince Priebus. 'Explosive': The New York Times says firing Mueller would be "politically explosive" given Trump's recent firing of James Comey. It might mean that he'd have to fire deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, too, the man who appointed Mueller in the first place. A big no: Rosenstein himself testified before a Senate panel on Tuesday and was asked a simple question by Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen: “Have you seen good cause for firing Mueller?” He had a simple answer, per the Hill: “I have not." Conservative push: Newt Gingrich initially praised Mueller as a "superb choice," but on Monday, he tweeted: "Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair. Look who he is hiring.check fec reports. Time to rethink." Fellow conservative Ann Coulter joined the push, tweeting, "Now that we know TRUMP IS NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION, Sessions should take it back & fire Mueller." Big hire: Gingrich's remark about Mueller's hires may be in reference to high-powered criminal specialist Michael Dreeben joining the team. A post at Lawfare on Friday called the hire "the worst thing that happened to Donald Trump this week," because it signaled an aggressive investigation. Overplayed? A post at Axios suggests all this will amount to nothing. "Ordering the firing of Mueller really does seem unlikely," writes Mike Allen. "The near-universal advice Trump will be getting from his White House team—and from legal advisors close to the administration—will be that it's a catastrophic idea to get rid of Mueller." Before Ruddy: On ABC Sunday, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow perhaps got all this started by refusing to rule out the possibility of Trump firing Mueller. "I'm not going to speculate on what he will, or will not, do," said Sekulow, per Politico. He added that he "can't imagine" it would happen, however.


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Viewers who luxuriated in a good cry after “The Fault in Our Stars” may be gratified to know that it’s not time to stop sobbing. The perfect bookend to a tear-stained summer, “If I Stay” has arrived in theaters with the same good taste, modest cool factor and shameless tear-jerking that made its predecessor such a multi-hankie hit.

 “If I Stay,” which was adapted by R.J. Cutler (“A Perfect Candidate,” “The September Issue”) from Gayle Forman’s novel, hews largely to the same formula as “The Fault in Our Stars”: An attractive young couple grapples with first love and looming mortality against a scenic backdrop, the mechanics of sexual awakenings safely couched in soft-focus ellipses (“Adam, I’ve never . . . ”). As in “The Fault in Our Stars,” this story is told from the point of view of an exceptionally self-aware young woman staring down impending death. Here, though, she’s anxiously watching over herself as she lies in a coma, trying to decide whether life is still worth living after nearly losing it and everything else in a horrifying car crash.

 It’s a maudlin, potentially mawkish setup, but first-time feature director Cutler and his screenwriter, Shauna Cross, put an amber glow on even the toughest aspects of a story in which everything is just about perfect (until it most decidedly isn’t). Chloe Grace Moretz plays Mia Hall, a 17-year-old cello prodigy whose happy, laid-back life with her former punk-rocker parents is upended when she meets a handsome guitarist named Adam (Jamie Blackley). Their mildly piquant romance — she idolizes Yo-Yo Ma, he’s more of a Ramones guy — is of the classic opposites-attract variety, spiced by dashes of O. Henry’s lyrical irony. At a Halloween party, eager to please each other, she dons a platinum wig as Debbie Harry and he comes dressed as Beethoven.

 It’s all played for minimum dramatic tension and maximum aestheticized wish fulfillment, heightened by Cutler’s tendency to film everything slightly out of focus and Cross’s to write fuzzy-wuzzy dialogue like “Adam, that song was great.” Even more idealized is Mia’s family, headed by a mom and dad who clearly trained at the Pitchfork School for Cool Hipster Parenting. Played with warmth and easy understatement by Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard, Mia’s ’rents casually name-check Iggy Pop and Kim Gordon as they roam around their brightly painted Portland bungalow, bedecked with the requisite number of cred-signifying posters and musical detritus. It’s all too flawless to be believed — we never see Mia argue with her parents, much less with her Alice Cooper-quoting little brother — but the colorful, cozy domestic portrait makes it that much more unsettling when, on a snowy road one day, it all comes to a shatteringly violent end.

 “If I Stay” toggles between two worlds: Mia’s desperate, barefooted sojourn at the hospital and flashbacks to the life she may or may not decide to leave behind. Although the emotionalism begins to drag the narrative down as her anguished vigil goes on and on and on, Cutler smoothly navigates Mia’s double-sided experience, albeit in a way that recalls the “Nashville” episodes he has directed more than the ethereal otherworldliness of, say, “The Lovely Bones.”

 Moretz, best known for her spiky, moodily effective turns in such tough films as “Kick-Ass” and “Let Me In,” submerges her most interesting contours in service to a blandly edge-free character. Blackley is slightly more convincing as the sweaty, discreetly pierced frontman of an on-the-rise, safely pseudo hard-rockin’ band.

 Granted, the group isn’t channeling Joey Ramone as much as Clear Channel’s pop heartthrob du jour. But the musical sequences — including an impromptu Smashing Pumpkins jam in Mia’s back yard — bring some welcome verve to talky scenes of soulful heart-to-hearts and teary hand-wringing. Rest assured, there’s plenty of that, too, in “If I Stay.” But even at its most wrenchingly painful, the film readily delivers generous dollops of pleasure.

 ★ ★ ½

 PG-13. At area theaters. Contains thematic elements, some sexual material and mild profanity. 106 minutes. ||||| Watch a clip from the film "If I Stay," starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Mireille Enos, and Jamie Blackley. Photo/Video: Warner Bros.

 The dairy industry doesn't have a monopoly on milking machines. "If I Stay" tries to squeeze every last drop of feeling from the plight of its teenage heroine. A gifted musician with nurturing parents, Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz) finds herself caught in limbo between life and death after surviving, although barely, a terrible crash on a snow-covered Oregon highway during a family outing. Surveying the accident scene as an ethereal wraith, she can see the loved ones she has lost. She can also see her own shattered body, first by the side of the road and then in a coma in the intensive-care unit of a Portland hospital. What she must decide now, in the face of her loss, is whether to stay among the living. What young audiences will decide soon is whether the movie's many moments of genuine sweetness and affecting tenderness can survive the persistent silliness of Mia's out-of-body excursions.

 She is a busybody wraith, chasing around the hospital to keep tabs on herself, her friends and her extended family while the narrative suffers frequent, spasmodic flashbacks to the life she may be leaving. The supernatural element came straight from the book, the popular young-adult novel of the same name by Gayle Forman, and disembodied heroes or heroines have figured in successful screen entertainments from "Topper" through "Beetlejuice" to "Ghost." But serious drama is trickier, as witness the unlovely fate of Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones." What works for readers, left free to produce their own versions of fantasy devices, can be gigglesome for audiences confronted with a film's prefab literalism.

 At its best, "If I Stay" evokes the primacy of friendship, the warmth of family—Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard play Mia's lively ex-hippie parents—and the urgency of adolescent love: Jamie Blackley as Adam, Mia's boyfriend, has some of the film's stronger scenes. (The strongest may be a heartfelt speech by that old pro Stacy Keach, who plays Mia's grandfather.) But the production as a whole is awfully clumsy, and Ms. Moretz, who is only 17, needs more help than she gets from the first-time feature director, R.J. Cutler. So does Mia stay or go? Let's just say that she's a child of her generation, with an unshakable sense of empowerment. Never mind what God or random chance may have in store for her. "I'm running the show," she declares toward the end. Deathless words from a near-death decider.

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 'Spirited Away' (2001)

 Hayao Miyazaki's animated masterpiece certainly qualifies as a ghost story, but it's also a coming-of-age story in which a girl takes refuge in her fantasies and emerges from them a stronger person. The 10-year-old heroine, Chihiro, finds herself alone after her parents make memorable pigs of themselves at an abandoned restaurant, and forges a new life for herself in a glittering, steaming hot-springs resort where spirits of every shape, disposition and composition—good and evil, opaque and transparent—come to refresh themselves. A must-see for film lovers of all ages. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. |||||

– If I Stay tells the story of a teen girl with a big future who's nearly killed in a car crash. Informed by out-of-body experiences, she must decide whether to stick around on Earth or head to Heaven. It'll make you cry, but it doesn't offer much otherwise, critics say. (Audiences, however, seem to disagree: 80% like it at Rotten Tomatoes, twice the figure for critics). Some examples: It's up to audiences "whether the movie's many moments of genuine sweetness and affecting tenderness can survive the persistent silliness of Mia's out-of-body excursions," writes Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal. "At its best, If I Stay evokes the primacy of friendship, the warmth of family … and the urgency of adolescent love. But the production as a whole is awfully clumsy." "Full disclosure: I went through half a pack of Kleenex watching If I Stay," writes Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. "But know this: Those tears are no more honestly earned than if director RJ Cutler had merely been chopping onions in front of me. … The movie is designed not to explore the experience of illness, or first love, or adolescence, but merely to make us swoon, sigh, and sob." The movie "hews largely to the same formula as The Fault in Our Stars," another book-based film dealing with teens facing death, notes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. But If I Stay offers "the perfect bookend to a tear-stained summer": "Even at its most wrenchingly painful, the film readily delivers generous dollops of pleasure." In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan calls the film "a flat-out, all-in fantasy romance, an unashamed tear-jerker that is unafraid of glossy emotions." Sure, "every moment in If I Stay is not all that it might be"—but when its leads "are looking into each other's eyes, you are not going to care."


– The man accused of raping a 15-year-old girl while they were students at a prestigious New Hampshire boarding school was found guilty of misdemeanor sexual assault but acquitted of more serious felony charges today, the Boston Globe reports. The victim claims Owen Labrie, 18 at the time, forced sexual intercourse on her—ignoring her pleas to stop and fighting to remove her underwear—in the attic of a St. Paul's School building in May 2014. In his defense, Labrie, who attended a choir concert following the attack, says the two never had intercourse—he says he started putting a condom on before deciding he didn't want to have sex with the victim—and any sexual contact was consensual, CNN reports. He said it seemed like the victim was "having a great time." During the two-week trial, Labrie's friends testified he bragged about having sex with the victim, and prosecutors claimed Labrie and his friends were competing to see who could "slay" the most girls before graduation, the Globe reports. CNN states the defense attempted to put blame on St. Paul's itself for encouraging a tradition known as "senior salute," in which seniors attempt to have sexual interactions with underclassmen before commencement. The defense claims the school is "failing" its students by tolerating senior salute, which it said harmed both its client and the victim. In addition to misdemeanor sexual assault, the jury found Labrie guilty of using a computer to lure a minor and endangering the welfare of a child. He was acquitted of felony rape.

Expand this summary.

Attorney J.W. Carney put his arm around Owen Labrie, who wept when the verdict was announced.

 CONCORD, N.H. — Former St. Paul’s School student Owen Labrie was acquitted Friday of raping a 15-year-old girl in a secluded room on the campus in May of last year, but was found guilty on lesser sexual-assault charges involving a minor — a split verdict that left both teenagers in tears.

 After about eight hours of deliberations, the jury of nine men and three women determined that Labrie had sex with the girl, then a freshman at the Concord boarding school, but that prosecutors had failed to prove he had acted without her consent, as she had asserted.

 Labrie could face a sentence that includes several years in jail — a maximum of seven years on a computer enticement conviction, which is a felony, and as much as a year each on the four misdemeanors. Sentencing was set for Oct. 29.

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 In addition, Labrie, who was a straight-A student, will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, a prosecutor said afterward.

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 In the emotional close to the two-week trial, Labrie burst into tears at the word guilty, and later shook his head in disbelief. Behind him in the courtroom, his mother buried her head in her hands.

 The teenage girl wept in her mother’s arms nearby. In a statement, the girl and her family said the convictions delivered “a measure of justice” for victims of sexual violence.

 “While he was not convicted on all charges, Owen Labrie was held accountable in some way by a jury of his peers for crimes he committed against our daughter,” a family spokeswoman read to a throng of reporters outside the courthouse. “There is no joy in this outcome, however, as our daughter can never get back what she has lost.”

 Labrie left the courthouse without comment, but his lawyer, J.W Carney Jr., said Labrie was devastated.

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 “Owen’s future is forever changed,” Carney said, likening the conviction to a brand that “will stay with him the rest of his life.”

 The trial revealed the sexual culture at the highly selective 159-year-old boarding school, whose notable alumni include Secretary of State John F. Kerry and “Doonesbury’’ creator Garry Trudeau. Annual tuition exceeds $50,000, although many students, like Labrie, receive scholarships.

 In often-crude testimony, jurors heard how Labrie and his friends sought to “slay” — a slang term for having sex — as many girls as they could, using their status on campus to woo underclassmen in a rite known as the “senior salute.”

 In its statement, the girl’s family said they still felt betrayed that the school “allowed and fostered a toxic culture that left our daughter and other students at risk to sexual violence.”

 “We trusted the school to protect her and it failed us,” they said.

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 The school, in its own statement, did not respond directly to complaints that it had failed to curb such behavior, but it praised the girl for her resolve.

 ‘’

 Electronic messages read during trial indicated that for months, Labrie had a crush on the younger student, a sister of a classmate, before inviting her to meet that night. He brought a blanket and a condom to a secluded mechanical room.

 Their stories diverged from that point. The girl tearfully testified that Labrie had sex with her over her multiple objections, ignoring her efforts to keep her bra and underwear on.

 Labrie described a playful, consensual encounter in which he decided against having sex after a moment of “divine inspiration.”

 Jurors found Labrie guilty of three counts of misdemeanor sexual assault, endangering a child, and using computer services to lure a minor, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of seven years in jail.

 The sexual-assault charges would commonly be referred to as statutory rape, which is typically a felony. In this case, however, they were misdemeanors because, the indictment read, the difference in age between Labrie and the girl was four years or less.

 Carney, meanwhile, said the jury concluded the sexual encounter was mutual and that the convictions for misdemeanor assaults were based on the girl’s age.

 “One teenager was found guilty of having consensual sex with another teenager,” he said.

 Carney described the computer-enticement charge as “overreaching” and indicated he may appeal. He said the law, which applies to juvenile victims younger than 16, was not meant to apply to teenagers making social plans.

 Carney said Labrie’s comments to several friends that he had sex with the girl were the “most damning” evidence against him. Labrie, in his testimony this week, said he lied about what happened in order to show off.

 “If he knew then what would result, he would have told his friends the truth,” Carney said.

 Carney said he will seek probation with “serious conditions.” Prosecutors declined to specify what sentence they will recommend until a review is conducted before a hearing slated for late October.

 Labrie will remain free on $15,000 bail, although prosecutor Catherine Ruffle urged higher bail, saying Labrie could flee now that he has been convicted.

 “The circumstances have changed,” she said.

 Prosecutors credited the teenage girl for her courage during the trial, and said the convictions “send a message” that victims of sexual assault can find justice.

 “It’s a testament to the courage of the young woman,” said Scott W. Murray, Merrimack County attorney. Murray said his office was satisfied with the convictions, and that they “vindicate the victim.”

 St. Paul’s School also lauded the girl, whose wrenching testimony was a centerpiece of the trial.

 In a statement released after the verdict, Michael Hirschfeld, rector at the Episcopal school, commended the former student’s “remarkable moral courage and strength.”

 “Her resolve and unwavering commitment to the truth have been inspiring to us and to many outside our school community,” he wrote. “We can only hope that time will bring some measure of healing and comfort to both her and her family.”

 After the verdict, Labrie, whose acceptance to Harvard was rescinded, rested his head on the table and later stared at the ceiling. Sitting behind him, his mother called out to him that she loved him, and he turned to say he loved her, too.

 “I didn’t lie to you,” he said, blinking back tears.

 Peter Schworm can be reached at schworm@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @globepete ||||| Concord, New Hampshire (CNN) A New Hampshire jury on Friday convicted Owen Labrie of five counts -- including one felony -- in connection with the sexual assault of another student at a prestigious boarding school, but it acquitted him of more serious charges.

 Labrie, 19, a former student at the elite St. Paul's School, appeared shaken as the verdict was read, at one point nodding his head and reaching for a tissue to wipe tears.

 At the time of the assault, the accuser was 15 and Labrie was an 18-year-old senior.

 In the end, the jury did not appear to believe the former prep school student's claim that there was no intercourse, but it also seemed to dismiss his accuser's testimony that it was against her will, CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin said.

 Labrie was convicted of a felony charge and four misdemeanors: the most serious count being the use of an online service or the Internet to seduce, solicit or entice a child under age 16 in order to a commit sexual assault. He also was convicted of three counts of misdemeanor sexual assault and child endangerment.

 At his October 29 sentencing, Labrie faces a maximum sentence of 11 years. Labrie, who will have to register for inclusion on the sex offender list, was released on bail under a 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. curfew.

 He was acquitted of the more serious counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault -- punishable by 10 to 20 years in prison -- as well as simple assault, a misdemeanor.

 There were no winners in the case, Hostin said.

 "In New Hampshire, forcible rape -- the requirement to have force -- is not an issue," she said. "It's only consent. And so the jury clearly did not believe that she did not consent and that's why we have the felonies tossed out. Let's be clear, those were the most important charges for this prosecution."

 Labrie's conviction, however, ensures that he's added to the sex offender registry, Hostin said.

 "That's a problem with these sex cases," she said. "We have to look at them a little bit differently because no does mean no, and no is not necessarily a word, 'no' can be an action. Our sex laws really need to evolve."

 The jury, made up of nine men and three women, deliberated for 7½ hours.

 "In essence, what happened as a result of this trial is one teenager was found guilty of having consensual sex with another teenager," Labrie's lawyer, J.W. Carney, said after the hearing.

 He said the internet-related charge was actually intended to prosecute people who disguise their age and try to lure unsuspecting children into sexual encounters, not people like his client.

 "I believe that this computer statute was never intended for kids getting together consensually at the high school they both attend," he said. "It's overreaching."

 The victim's family said: "A measure of justice has been served for victims of sexual violence. While he was not convicted on all charges, Owen Labrie was held accountable in some way by a jury of his peers for crimes he committed against our daughter."

 "This conviction requires him to take ownership for his actions and gives him the opportunity to reflect upon the harm he has caused. There is no joy in this outcome, however, as our daughter can never get back what she has lost nor can St. Paul's School ever be our community again."

 In the statement, the family said it felt "betrayed that St. Paul's School allowed and fostered a toxic culture that left our daughter and other students at risk to sexual violence. We trusted the school to protect her and it failed us."

 St. Paul's Rector Michael G. Hirschfeld, in a statement, commended the "remarkable moral courage and strength demonstrated by the young woman who has suffered through this nightmare."

 "Her resolve and unwavering commitment to the truth have been inspiring to us and to many outside our School community. We can only hope that time will bring some measure of healing and comfort to both her and her family. The entire St. Paul's School community has been deeply affected by this incident. It is our responsibility to ensure that our students live and learn together in a community that is built on respect, caring, and support for one another. Anything short of that cannot and will not be accepted."

 On Wednesday, Labrie -- with his accuser watching in the courtroom -- took the stand and described the encounter last year as consensual. He said the two of them sneaked into an attic room in a St. Paul's School academic building a few days before graduation and together spread a flannel blanket Labrie had brought with him.

 In closing arguments, prosecutor Joseph Cherniske told the jury that the defendant carefully planned out a sexual assault and viewed the taking of the girl's virginity as a source of pride.

 "It wasn't the school's fault," he said, rebutting the defense argument that St. Paul's encouraged a tradition known as the "Senior Salute" in which seniors sought to have sexual encounters with younger students.

 Carney accused St. Paul's of allowing the "Senior Salute" to flourish.

 "The idea that you would wink at a tradition that 'Senior Salute' represents is shocking," he said, denying that his client sexually penetrated the girl.

 "It damages children and in this case it damaged both (the accuser) and Owen," he said. "When you saw the culture of St. Paul's, it was one that encouraged, I submit, the concept of 'Senior Salute.' In fact, it was so revered on the campus it became a tradition."

 In a statement to the "St. Paul's School Community," Hirschfeld and James M. Waterbury, president of the school board, denied that the "Senior Salute" was a tradition at the 159-year-old prep school.

 "The phrase 'senior salute' describes a wide range of behaviors," the statement said. "It was never understood to include the conduct engaged in by Owen Labrie. That behavior was never condoned by the School, and we took action when it surfaced."

 The statement said Labrie was banned from the school and his rector's award was rescinded. In addition, the student handbook was revised to "state more explicitly that participation in any 'game' of sexual conquest by any name ... would be grounds for expulsion."

 On Wednesday, Labrie testified that sweatshirts, shirts and later pants were removed but the two kept their underwear on.

 When a defense attorney asked about their demeanor, Labrie testified they were both giggling and smiling and that the girl held him in an affectionate way.

 "I thought she was having a great time," he said.

 Labrie, 18 at the time, said he may have gotten carried away at times, leading to bruises she reported on her breasts. They were both aroused, he said, so he went to put a condom on, but he stopped himself.

 "It wouldn't have been a good move to have sex with this girl," he told the court. "It would not have been a good choice for me to make."

 The liaison awkwardly ended after a few more brief kisses, and Labrie hurried to a choir concert, he said.

 Her testimony

 The accuser, now 16, testified last week that Labrie penetrated her with his fingers before raping her.

 "I was raped!" she said when a defense attorney suggested she had sent conflicting signals to the defendant.

 The defense depicted Labrie as a great student, on a full scholarship, who wanted to attend Harvard, take divinity classes and perhaps become a minister.

 The prosecution repeatedly questioned him about telling friends after the encounter that he had sex with the girl.

 He was bragging and lying, Labrie told the court.

 He also said for the first time that his boxers were damp and he may have ejaculated on them before he put on a condom. He didn't tell police about it, he said, because their questions focused on whether the two had sex.

 "This was a very difficult case because of Owen's own statements to his friends," defense lawyer Carney said after the trial. "I think the critical evidence was not the testimony of the complainant, it was the testimony of Owen given when he was talking to his friends and acting like a teenager who didn't want to say he had been unsuccessful in his 'Senior Salute.' "

 State criminalist Katie Swango said semen and sperm were found on the young woman's underwear. Further testing of sperm cells found on the underwear were inconclusive. However, some of the biological material found on the underwear matched Labrie's DNA, she said.

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 Another state criminalist, Kevin McMahon, said he examined a swab from the accuser's cervix and found no evidence of sperm. |||||