The Coffee shop network gave OCN $5 million at the start of the collaboration, which, when paired with the additional $1 million raised, it claims will create up to $42 million in loans to small businesses.

Starbucks has often been criticized in the past but this new scheme is hoped to raise their profile in an ethical way that will benefit many American communities hard hit by recession.

Scientists now believe that they understand how the malaria parasite entersred blood cells.

The scientists, who work for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK, identified a red blood cell receptor that acts like a gateway into the cell. When they blocked the malaria protein from interacting with this receptor, the disease could not get in.

If you are visiting a country where malaria is endemic then it is very important you take out travel insurance over 80 to ensure you are covered for any medical issues that may arise.

“By identifying a single receptor that appears to be essential for parasites to invade human red blood cells, we have also identified an obvious and very exciting focus for vaccine development,” study co-author Dr. Julian Rayner said in statement.

The main group of people who are against this, driven on by a ‘vested interest’ Daily Telegraph campaign, are the older generation who have benefited from buying at a fraction of todays’ prices and the most rampant house price inflation in history. They are more concerned with conserving the value of their property and less so about the greenbelt for which they use as the main reason to prevent these reforms.

The UK chancellor said new planning laws would help younger people take a step on to the property ladder.

Young and travelling around the world? The ensure you have the best backpacker insurance in case of any medical issues.

The head of the UK’s leading cancer charity has said understanding of the disease is advancing “exponentially”, as potentially groundbreaking trials to genetically test tumours of 9,000 newly diagnosed patients begin.

Describing a “golden era” of research, Harpal Kumar, the chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said there has been “an explosion in our understanding of what cancer is, why it happens, why it doesn’t happen in some people and why it moves around the body”.

The trials backed by the Department of Health and Cancer Research UK are being launched next month in seven hospitals across Britain. Scientists believe the results could revolutionise cancer treatments.

They will aim to find out which existing drugs the cancers are susceptible to. They will also potentially pave the way for discoveries of new medicines that are personalised or targeted to the genetic makeup of an individual’s cancer and therefore far more effective

Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco were among nine supermarkets and dairy processors today fined almost £50 million for fixing cheese and milk prices over seven years ago.

According to an investigation by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) four supermarkets, Asda, Safeway, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, indirectly co-ordinated increases in cheese and milk prices through five dairy processors, Arla, Dairy Crest, McLelland, The Cheese Company and Wiseman.

Tesco was the only retailer to not receive a reduction in its fine for agreeing to early resolution and was fined £10.43 million for colluding with companies to fix cheese prices in 2002 and 2003. Sainsbury’s was dealt the largest fine of £11.04 million for fixing both cheese and milk prices.

If you need to know the current best buy interest rates then be sure to search around the net every week.

In total eight companies were fined £49.51million, while Arla benefited from compete immunity for being the first company to alert the OFT to the anti-competitive behaviour.

In the past few days, claims have been made that the paper authorised hacking into the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and the families of 7/7 bombing victims.

Apparently you only need a vocabulary of around 800 words to read the paper. That says it all. Godd riddance to bad rubbish!

A man turning dirt in his back yard stumbled onto buried treasure — hundreds of pieces of centuries-old jewelry and other precious objects that Austrian authorities described Friday as a fairy-tale find.

Austria’s department in charge of national antiquities said the trove consists of more than 200 rings, brooches, ornate belt buckles, gold-plated silver plates and other pieces or fragments, many encrusted with pearls, fossilized coral and other ornaments. It says the objects are about 650 years old and are being evaluated for their provenance and worth.

While not assigning a monetary value to the buried bling, the enthusiastic language from the normally staid Federal Office for Memorials reflected the significance it attached to the discovery.

Good news from the world of medical research.

A ”universal” vaccine, which is part of a new generation of drugs that use the body’s own defenses to fight the disease, stopping tumours in their tracks, could be available in just two years.

The TeloVac jab could revolutionise the treatment of cancer.

But it is hoped it will be effective against many other tumours, including those of the skin, lung and liver. Breast and prostate cancers may also be within its grasp.

Rather than attacking the cancer cells, like many existing drugs, it harnesses the power of the immune system to fight the tumours.

If you are travelling abroad make sure you have medical insurance over 80 to ensure you have no expensive bills.

It works by encouraging the immune system to seek out and destroy an enzyme called telomerase. Found at high levels in many cancer cells, telomerase effectively makes them immortal, allowing them to live on when healthy cells would die – easing the growth and spread of the tumour.

The Oxford University online study involved a questionnaire with 12,000 couples from 18 countries.. They were asked a series of questions about whether they had visited internet dating websites, other online services and where else they might go looking for a partner. The questions related to the period up to 2009.

The largest group looking for online love was surprisingly the over 40s which goes against what many people would have thought. The perception is that it’s a young persons thing to date online.

The most lively online nation appears to be Brazil – more than eight of out ten of those interviewed who had access to the internet said they had met someone online. By contrast, in Japan, a country known for embracing technology in so many ways, internet users were rather reluctant to engage with online dating.

Since that time, 18 studies have examined zinc in preventing or treating colds. Some found zinc supplements were modestly helpful, others failed to turn up any benefits.

One analysis of 14 studies, published in 2007, concluded that many of the studies were too flawed to draw any conclusions.

In the latest report, published by the Cochrane Library, an international network of experts who conduct systematic reviews of research, scientists in India evaluated 15 studies, including four published since 2000.

Two of the studies evaluated focused on zinc’s effectiveness in preventing colds and the rest on its ability to shorten the duration of colds. The 15 studies involved 1,360 participants ranging in age from 1 to 65 with good overall health.

Pooling the data, researchers found that people who took zinc within 24 hours of the start of symptoms were over their colds about one day sooner than people who took placebos. The analysis also found that the severity of cold symptoms was somewhat milder among people who took zin