At least 14 injured in attack at Houston college

By Andrea Lorenz

(Reuters) - At least 14 people were injured during a mass stabbing at a local community college in the northwest Houston area Tuesday morning, according to the local rescue officials.

Four people were critically injured during the incident at the Cy-Fair campus of Lone Star College in Harris County, the Cy-Fair volunteer fire department said.

One suspect was detained, local police said.

"LOCKDOWN at LSC-CyFair. Seek shelter now. If away, stay away," the school posted on Twitter at noon local time.

Three people were shot at a separate campus of Lone Star College in January.

(Reporting By Andrea Lorenz; Writing by Brendan O'Brien)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/multiple-injuries-reported-stabbing-houston-college-173356578.html

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Obama warns GOP against blocking gun bill

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? President Barack Obama says the contentious debate over gun control measures "shouldn't be about politics." He's warning Republican lawmakers against using delay tactics to sink legislation.

Obama is speaking about his gun proposals in Connecticut, where 20 children and 6 adults were killed in a horrific school shooting last year. The shooting spurred fresh debate in Washington over gun control measures.

The president is singling out GOP lawmakers who want to use procedural maneuvers to block legislation. Obama says the move would be akin to saying the public's opinion doesn't matter.

He is also challenging the notion that gun legislation would be a political victory for him. He says the debate "isn't about me" and should instead focus on families that have been torn apart by violence.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-warns-gop-against-blocking-gun-bill-215546035.html

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Brain's stress circuits undergo profound learning early in life, scientists find

Apr. 7, 2013 ? Researchers at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute have discovered that stress circuits in the brain undergo profound learning early in life. Using a number of cutting edge approaches, including optogenetics, Jaideep Bains, PhD, and colleagues have shown stress circuits are capable of self-tuning following a single stress. These findings demonstrate that the brain uses stress experience during early life to prepare and optimize for subsequent challenges.

The team was able to show the existence of unique time windows following brief stress challenges during which learning is either increased or decreased. By manipulating specific cellular pathways, they uncovered the key players responsible for learning in stress circuits in an animal model. These discoveries culminated in the publication of two back-to-back studies in the April 7 online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

"These new findings demonstrate that systems thought to be 'hardwired' in the brain, are in fact flexible, particularly early in life," says Bains, a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. "Using this information, researchers can now ask questions about the precise cellular and molecular links between early life stress and stress vulnerability or resilience later in life."

Stress vulnerability, or increased sensitivity to stress, has been implicated in numerous health conditions including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. Although these studies used animal models, similar mechanisms mediate disease progression in humans.

"Our observations provide an important foundation for designing more effective preventative and therapeutic strategies that mitigate the effects of stress and meet society's health challenges," he says.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Calgary, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal References:

1. Wataru Inoue, Dinara V Baimoukhametova, Tam?s F?zesi, Jaclyn I Wamsteeker Cusulin, Kathrin Koblinger, Patrick J Whelan, Quentin J Pittman, Jaideep S Bains. Noradrenaline is a stress-associated metaplastic signal at GABA synapses. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3373
2. Jaclyn I Wamsteeker Cusulin, Tam?s F?zesi, Wataru Inoue, Jaideep S Bains. Glucocorticoid feedback uncovers retrograde opioid signaling at hypothalamic synapses. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3374

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/mind_brain/depression/~3/k7ZzaCJsu0Q/130407133314.htm

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Thatcherism: the radical ideology that became the global norm

By Jeremy Gaunt

LONDON (Reuters) - More than three decades after Margaret Thatcher became Britain's prime minister, her economic legacy - reviled and revered - still ripples across the world.

Whether it is euro zone finance ministers demanding debt-laden countries privatize state-run companies, U.S. politicians seeking spending cuts and curbs on unions, or Britain itself putting its Royal Mail on the auction bloc, the tenets of Thatcherism, for better or worse, are alive.

Thatcher, who died on Monday aged 87, stood for deregulation, a smaller state, free markets and privatization. If that sounds familiar, it is because her playbook has been copied around the world.

None of those policies were common in 1979 when Thatcher became Britain's first woman prime minister with the country reeling in post-war economic decay.

"She shifted the boundaries of what was politically possible," said Steve Davies, a director and economic historian at Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs think tank.

"On the one side policies such as privatization and deregulation came to be taken seriously. On the other, policies that were taken seriously - like the command economy - are no longer taken seriously."

Thatcherism - and its U.S. cousin Reaganomics, after the president, Ronald - were seen as radical departures. The term privatization, for example, was barely known before her tenure. A Google search in 2013 brings up more than 14.5 million hits.

When Thatcher took over Britain, much of its industry like those of other European countries was in the hands of the state.

She sold off steelmakers, carmakers, aerospace firms, oil and gas giants, airlines and the telecoms monopoly - often to strong objections from political opponents and workers within the former state-owned industries. Even public housing was offered for sale, at a discount, to the tenants who lived in it.

There is still opposition. The U.S. public services union ASCME, for example, describes privatization as "driven by wrong-minded public officials and corporate greed".

And not all privatizations were successful. Bold competition has brought down costs and encouraged growth in some areas such as telecommunications. Complex, heavily infrastructured businesses such as railways - privatized by her successor John Major - have arguably done less well.

But the debate now is generally on how far privatization should run, not on whether it should be unwound.

Sell-offs of state-owned businesses are now a de rigeur part of euro zone bailout programs. In Greece, the European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout requires the sale of real estate, more than 20 companies, and dozens of marinas and ports.

Thatcher's economic influence outside of Britain was most visible in Eastern Europe. After the fall of the Communist bloc at the end of her tenure, new leaders there made her a hero and embraced privatization as the express route to capitalism.

In many countries the transfer of state assets to private hands was a success; in others, less so.

In Russia, a privatization scheme designed by self-professed Thatcherites was brazenly run by its own beneficiaries. It awarded the crown jewels of Soviet industry to a handful of politically-connected insiders, creating a caste of overnight billionaires, more than a few of whom would later become Thatcher's neighbors in London's exclusive Belgravia district.

"The emergence of oligarchic structures and dramatic increases in inequality... demonstrate the limitations of applying Baroness Thatcher's legacy too literally," said Erik Berglof, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

DEREGULATION

Thatcher's "big bang" deregulation of British financial markets saw the City of London strut into its role as Europe's banking capital, and helped turn global finance into the swaggering industry it became for the past generation.

Other industries faced the opposite fate on her watch. Her biggest battles were with coal miners, in a state-run sector that was already in rapid decline after Britain discovered cheaper, safer and cleaner offshore natural gas.

When she took power there were nearly a quarter of a million coal miners in Britain, sustaining communities that had known little else since the industrial revolution. When she left there were barely 50,000 people still working in the mines. Today only a few thousand remain.

Her embrace of deregulation would get mixed reviews at the moment, given the excesses that led to the financial crisis of 2008. Indeed, there has been something of a backlash against the relatively unfettered wealth-creation Thatcher espoused.

"Thatcher created a more dynamic and laissez faire society, but the social cost in terms of communities destroyed was immense," said Timothy Ash, a strategist at Standard Bank who remembers long lines of police vans outside his school, which was adjacent to a coal mine that was later closed down.

But free market economics - epitomized by Europe's single market, which Thatcher supported even as she waved her handbag threateningly at much of the rest of the bloc's ideas - has become the dominant economic philosophy in most of the world.

Again, the argument today is on the issue of how much you can protect your economy or control excesses, rather than on the assumption that you should run things from the centre.

"There are still legitimate question about outcomes," said Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York. "But she tremendously advanced the case of free markets for goods, capital and labor around the world."

(Additional reporting by Carolyn Cohn and Sujata Rao; Editing by Peter Graff)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thatcherism-radical-ideology-became-global-norm-181101505--business.html

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Surprising predictor of ecosystem chemistry

Public release date: 8-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Kyla Dahlin
kyla.dahlin@gmail.com
415-238-1916
Carnegie Institution

Washington, D.C. Carnegie scientists have found that the plant species making up an ecosystem are better predictors of ecosystem chemistry than environmental conditions such as terrain, geology, or altitude. This is the first study using a new, high-resolution airborne, chemical-detecting instrument to map multiple ecosystem chemicals. The result, published in the April 8, 2013, Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a key step toward understanding how species composition affects carbon, nitrogen and other nutrient cycling, and the effects of climate change, land use, and other ecosystem pressures.

Two important ecological goals are to understand the distribution and diversity of plants in their environment and how nutrients and energy flow through ecosystems. Both are essential to predict how the environment may change in the future, but untangling the relative importance of different influences has remained challenging.

Lead author Kyla Dahlin explained: "We used the high-resolution mapping capabilities of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (CAO AToMS), and found that the plant communities that make up Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in Northern California were the strongest predictors. They explained 46% to 61% of the variation in plant chemical traits, and these traits hold the key to how ecosystems function."

The plant communities at Jasper Ridge include savanna/grasslands, evergreen oaks and chaparral, wetland ecosystems, and more. The researchers measured four traits mapped with CAO AToMS from the air: leaf nitrogen, leaf carbon, leaf water concentration, and canopy water content.

The researchers combined the airborne data with maps of known environmental regulators, such as terrain and geology, and maps of plant communities and land-use history to ask whether environmental conditions or plant communities were more indicative of the chemical variation of the vegetation. They found that environmental conditions played a role, but that plant communities were the stronger predictor.

Co-author Greg Asner, principal investigator of the CAO, commented, "The results are a powerful demonstration of the use of the latest airborne spectroscopic mapping techniques to understand the multiple chemicals in the foliage of vegetation, allowing us to relate the chemical information to biodiversity and environment. These are the tools of the future for ecological research and conservation science."

"This study is especially exciting for Carnegie because it answers questions about the roles of landscapes and plant communities that were posed by Carnegie investigators in the early decades of the 20th century," said co-author Chris Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology.

###

The Carnegie Airborne Observatory is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Avatar Alliance Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, Mary Anne Nyburg Baker and G. Leonard Baker, Jr., and William R. Hearst III.

The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. The department is located on the campus of Stanford University, but is an independent research organization funded by the Carnegie Institution. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.

The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.

---

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?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 8-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Kyla Dahlin
kyla.dahlin@gmail.com
415-238-1916
Carnegie Institution

Washington, D.C. Carnegie scientists have found that the plant species making up an ecosystem are better predictors of ecosystem chemistry than environmental conditions such as terrain, geology, or altitude. This is the first study using a new, high-resolution airborne, chemical-detecting instrument to map multiple ecosystem chemicals. The result, published in the April 8, 2013, Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a key step toward understanding how species composition affects carbon, nitrogen and other nutrient cycling, and the effects of climate change, land use, and other ecosystem pressures.

Two important ecological goals are to understand the distribution and diversity of plants in their environment and how nutrients and energy flow through ecosystems. Both are essential to predict how the environment may change in the future, but untangling the relative importance of different influences has remained challenging.

Lead author Kyla Dahlin explained: "We used the high-resolution mapping capabilities of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (CAO AToMS), and found that the plant communities that make up Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in Northern California were the strongest predictors. They explained 46% to 61% of the variation in plant chemical traits, and these traits hold the key to how ecosystems function."

The plant communities at Jasper Ridge include savanna/grasslands, evergreen oaks and chaparral, wetland ecosystems, and more. The researchers measured four traits mapped with CAO AToMS from the air: leaf nitrogen, leaf carbon, leaf water concentration, and canopy water content.

The researchers combined the airborne data with maps of known environmental regulators, such as terrain and geology, and maps of plant communities and land-use history to ask whether environmental conditions or plant communities were more indicative of the chemical variation of the vegetation. They found that environmental conditions played a role, but that plant communities were the stronger predictor.

Co-author Greg Asner, principal investigator of the CAO, commented, "The results are a powerful demonstration of the use of the latest airborne spectroscopic mapping techniques to understand the multiple chemicals in the foliage of vegetation, allowing us to relate the chemical information to biodiversity and environment. These are the tools of the future for ecological research and conservation science."

"This study is especially exciting for Carnegie because it answers questions about the roles of landscapes and plant communities that were posed by Carnegie investigators in the early decades of the 20th century," said co-author Chris Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology.

###

The Carnegie Airborne Observatory is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Avatar Alliance Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, Mary Anne Nyburg Baker and G. Leonard Baker, Jr., and William R. Hearst III.

The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. The department is located on the campus of Stanford University, but is an independent research organization funded by the Carnegie Institution. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.

The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/ci-spo040313.php

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How communities effectively punish antisocial behavior

Apr. 7, 2013 ? New research provides an insight into how groups of people tackle social dilemmas and effectively punish those engaging in anti-social behaviour.

Neighbours playing loud music is an example of where a social dilemma can arise about who should tackle the wrong-doer if a whole group of people is affected. If everyone expects someone else to punish the wrongdoer, the loud music will persist. However, research by the University of Oxford and the ETH Zurich has revealed that when a group can identify a strong member from amongst themselves, it is more likely that this results in a tacit agreement about who should punish the wrongdoer.

By contrast, when a group finds it hard to identify which of their members is the strongest, the wrongdoer is less likely to be deterred, say the findings published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a laboratory experiment, the researchers involved 120 volunteers, divided into groups of four, to play games with money tokens. Each player was given a bank of 140 money tokens with one of the four randomly assigned as the cheat. The cheat could decide whether to refrain from cheating and gain nothing, or risk cheating to potentially gain 70 tokens from each of the three players. The three players had to decide independently whether to challenge the cheat to reclaim the money for themselves, as well as the other players -- the snag being that the challenge would entail a monetary cost to the challenger while the free-riding players would retrieve the full 70 tokens. However, if none of the players challenged the cheat, the cheat would keep their tokens and get away with it.

First, the cost for the player challenging the cheat was set at 30 tokens, meaning that player could only claim 40 tokens while a free-rider received back 70 tokens. In this set of games, about one-third (35 per cent) of the players challenged the cheat to reclaim the money, despite the cost to themselves.

A marked change in the pattern emerged, however, when the costs to the challengers were made slightly unequal. While two of three players would lose 40 tokens for challenging the cheat, the other one of the three would only lose 30 tokens. In these games, a tacit agreement set in that the strongest of them, i.e. the player with the least to lose, should challenge the cheat, even though the differences in the monetary strengths of the players were only small. The researchers also varied the size of the penalty that would be imposed on the cheat to assess what role this played to stop cheating behaviour.

They found that in groups with a strong player, money tokens were reclaimed from the cheat by the strong player in 83 per cent of cases. What is more, when the penalty for cheating was increased from 0 to 40 penalty points, this resulted in a substantial reduction of cheating in groups with a strong player; a reduction as high as in groups with all equal players where the penalty for cheating was increased from 0 to 120 penalty points.

Surprisingly perhaps, the researchers discovered that when the wrongdoer knew that there was a strong player in the group and the risk of punishment was therefore high, this proved to be as effective a deterrent as monetary penalties three times higher in groups with players of equal strength.

Co-author Dr Wojtek Przepiorka, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, said: 'Our findings help us understand how social order was possible in human prehistory, where official law enforcement bodies did not exist. It suggests that the natural order was for groups where someone was marked out as the strongest would be more likely to challenge the wrongdoer. The idea of who was strongest would have varied according to the society's norms and culture: it could be body size, wealth, valour or other endowments.

'Interestingly this certainty of being punished can be a stronger deterrent than the size of the penalty itself. This is also informative of cooperative behaviour amongst members of a community and indicates how social norms may have developed.'

Andreas Diekmann, Professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich, who also authored the study, said: 'It is important to learn more about how social order has emerged in human groups without third party intervention. In contrast to previous studies, with our experiment we were able to demonstrate that it is possible to solve cooperation problems without assuming individuals with punitive preferences. A very small degree of inequality amongst the group members is enough to make the punishment of wrongdoers more likely and this has a deterrent effect. As a result, antisocial behaviour is reduced substantially even though punishment is rarely exercised.'

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Oxford.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. W. Przepiorka, A. Diekmann. Individual heterogeneity and costly punishment: a volunteer's dilemma. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013; 280 (1759): 20130247 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.0247

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/HocihPqN_Ug/130407144507.htm

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Girl next door Annette Funicello dies at 70

NEW YORK (AP) ? She was the first crush for a generation of boys, the perfect playmate for a generation of girls.

Annette Funicello, who became a child star as a cute-as-a-button Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s, ruled among baby boomers, who tuned in every weekday afternoon to watch her on their flickering black-and-white television sets.

Then they shed their mouse ears, as Annette did when she teamed up with Frankie Avalon during the '60s in a string of frothy, fun-in-the-sun movies with titles like "Beach Blanket Bingo" and "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini."

Decades later, she endeared herself to baby boomers all over again after she announced in 1992 that she had multiple sclerosis and began grappling with the slow, degenerative effects with remarkably good cheer and faith.

Funicello died on Monday at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfield, Calif., of complications from MS, the Walt Disney Co. said. She was 70 and had dropped from public view years ago.

"She really had a tough existence," Avalon told The Associated Press. "It's like losing a family member. I'm devastated but I'm not surprised."

Avalon said that when they were working together, she never realized how beloved she was. "She would say, 'Really?' She was so bashful about it. She was an amazing girl," he recalled.

The pretty, dark-haired Funicello was 13 when she gained fame on "The Mickey Mouse Club," a kids' variety show that consisted of stories, songs and dance routines. It ran on ABC from 1955 to 1959.

Cast after Walt Disney saw her at a dance recital, she appeared in the Mouseketeer uniform of mouse ears, a pleated skirt and a turtleneck sweater emblazoned with her first name, and captivated young viewers with her wholesome, girl-next-door appeal.

She became the most popular Mouseketeer, receiving 8,000 fan letters a month, 10 times more than any of the 23 other young performers.

"It was a happy time. They were wonderful times," she recalled in a TV interview as an adult ? and she might just as well have been speaking for her "Mickey Mouse Club" audience.

Singer and composer Paul Anka, the one-time teen idol who briefly dated Funicello when they were on the concert circuit in the late 1950s, said that like seemingly every young American male of the time, he was in love with her.

"She was just the girl next door and they were drawn just to her," Anka said. "She had that thing. She had the it, and there was just no stopping it."

They eventually drifted apart, but during the time they were together, he said, Disney tried to end their relationship, resulting in one of Anka's biggest hits, "Puppy Love."

"The Disney crowd, and understandably so, didn't want her too involved at too young an age," Anka told the AP. "We had our professional careers and what have you, and they continued to tell her it was a puppy love, and marriage should not be in question. And I wrote about it."

When "The Mickey Mouse Club" ended, Funicello was the only cast member to remain under contract to the studio. She appeared in such Disney movies as "Johnny Tremain," ''The Shaggy Dog," ''The Horsemasters," ''Babes in Toyland," ''The Misadventures of Merlin Jones" and "The Monkey's Uncle."

She also became a recording star, singing on 15 albums and hit singles such as "Tall Paul" and "Pineapple Princess."

Outgrowing the kid roles by the early '60s, Annette teamed with Avalon in a series of movies for American-International, the first film company to exploit the burgeoning teen market.

The filmmakers weren't aiming for art, and never stumbled across it. As Halliwell's Film Guide says of "Beach Party": "Quite tolerable in itself, it started an excruciating trend."

The films had songs, cameos by older stars and some laughs. The 1965 "Beach Blanket Bingo," for example, featured subplots involving a mermaid, a motorcycle gang and a skydiving school run by Don Rickles, and comic touches by silent film star Buster Keaton.

Among the other titles: "Muscle Beach Party," ''Bikini Beach," ''How to Stuff a Wild Bikini" and "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine."

The beach films featured ample youthful skin. But not Funicello's.

She remembered in 1987: "Mr. Disney said to me one day, 'Annette, I have a favor to ask of you. I know all the girls are wearing bikinis, but you have an image to uphold. I would appreciate it if you would wear a one-piece suit.' I did, and I never regretted it."

The shift in teen tastes begun by the Beatles in 1964 and Funicello's first marriage the following year pretty much killed off the beach-movie genre.

After that, she had no interest in edgier, more "adult" roles.

"People are more interested in changing my image than I am," she said in an interview. Scripts were sent to her, and "I read the first 10 pages and I'm a prostitute or a doper, and I fold them up and send them back."

In the 1970s, she made commercials for Skippy peanut butter, appearing with her real-life children.

She and Avalon were reunited in the 1987 movie "Back to the Beach," in which Lori Loughlin played their daughter.

Funicello was "kind and down-to-earth," Loughlin told the AP. "She was truly the embodiment of the friendly, all-American girl that we all loved to watch in the beach movies."

It was during the filming of "Back to the Beach" that Funicello noticed she had trouble walking ? the first insidious sign of MS. She gradually lost control of her legs. Fearing people might think she was drunk, she went public with her condition in 1992.

She wrote of her triumphs and struggles in her 1994 autobiography, "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" ? the title taken from a Disney song. In 1995, she appeared briefly in a television docudrama based on her book. And she spoke openly about the degenerative effects of MS.

"My equilibrium is no more; it's just progressively getting worse," she said. "But I thank God I just didn't wake up one morning and not be able to walk. You learn to live with it. You learn to live with anything, you really do."

Kathy Lennon, who was one of the singing Lennon Sisters and became friends with Funicello after appearing on "The Mickey Mouse Club," said she and Funicello stayed in touch until a few years ago, when Lennon made her usual call to wish the actress a happy birthday and learned that MS had robbed her of her ability to speak.

"Annie's just not talking now," Lennon recalled Funicello's husband saying.

Funicello was born Oct. 22, 1942, in Utica, N.Y., and her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 4. She began taking dance lessons, and she won a beauty contest at 9. Then came her discovery by Disney.

Funicello's devotion to Walt Disney remained throughout her life.

"He was the dearest, kindest person, and truly was like a second father to me," she said. "He was a kid at heart."

Asked about revisionist biographies that have portrayed Disney in a negative light, she said: "I don't know what went on in the conference rooms. I know what I saw. And he was wonderful."

In 1965, Funicello married her agent, Jack Gilardi, and they had three children, Gina, Jack and Jason. The couple divorced 18 years later, and in 1986 she married Glen Holt, a harness racehorse trainer.

After her film career ended, she devoted herself to her family.

"We are so sorry to lose Mother," her children said in a statement. "She is no longer suffering anymore and is now dancing in heaven."

___

Associated Press writers Bob Thomas, Greg Risling and John C. Rogers and AP Television Writer Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/girl-next-door-annette-funicello-dies-70-210233958.html

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