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The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, which is being inaugurated by French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday, is the centerpiece of Marseille's turn as the European Capital of Culture for 2013, which aims to attract 10 million visitors to the city this year.

Officials see it as a chance to transform the ravaged image of the metropolis, which was once a crossroad of Mediterranean civilization and bastion of the ancient Greeks, but is now considered one of Europe's deadliest cities.

Four decades of widespread poverty in Marseille saw the rise of a powerful mob scene, including a criminal underworld of drugs, prostitution and gambling. There were 24 fatal shootings in 2012 alone.

The violence, which has centered on territorial disputes between drug barons and involved Kalashnikov assault rifles in gang clashes, has fueled comparisons to the Italian Camorra stronghold of Naples. More recently, following investigations, a Socialist lawmaker representing Marseille in the national assembly was sentenced to prison for buying votes, a ruling she has appealed.

"We continue to present Marseille in national and foreign media just by crime, dirt, and letting itself go. ... We forget that Marseille has a beautiful history, contributing to the rich civilization of the Mediterranean," said Bruno Suzzarelli, the museum's director.

He said that the museum can help rebrand the city's image.

Overlooking the glimmering Mediterranean Sea on the Marseille's storied but disused pier, the museum is certainly an ambitious project. It is the first one in the world dedicated to the heritage of the Mediterranean basin, and France's only stand-alone national museum outside of Paris. It includes an impressive square building with a dappled metal shell designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti.

The museum has 1 million cultural artifacts from a region stretching from Spain to Israel and via the Balkans, Turkey and north Africa ending in Marseille itself. Added to that is a renovation of the grand 17th-century fortification Saint Jean, which was previously closed to the public. It's joined to the museum by a sleek metal gangway.

Officials are optimistic about the project, aiming for some 300,000 visitors a year to the museum alone, which would double what Marseille got in recent years.

The final product, which was 13 years in the making under three French presidents, is an expensive cultural gamble at a cost of more than 200 million euros ($260 million).

"It looks impressive, and we all hope it will succeed. We need real change here, renewal," said Chloe Rabuel, a Marseille bartender. "But we have to wait and see. Will people come?"

The museum has been designed to attract as many foreign tourists as possible, with captions written in French, English and Arabic. The site is some 15 minutes from the Marseille-Provence airport.

The collections represent dozens of cultures and their histories. Though half of museum's works drew on the collection from Paris' Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions a vast folklore museum that is now defunct the other half, including classical antiquities, comes from loans from other museums, particularly from Greece.

"We're representing the entire Mediterranean narrative," said Zeev Gourarier, the museum's curator. "We represent not just the victories of the revolutions in thinking and invention, but also the uncomfortable truths. ... Just like the history of Marseille has not been easy, the history of the Mediterranean has also been about repression, walls, false steps and violence. History repeats itself."

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Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP

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It was a shocking about-face.

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In his 2008 book, Ten Commandements to an Extraordinary Life, Jackson wrote, "When one hears the word meditation, it conjures an image of Maharishi Yoga talking about finding a mantra and striving for nirvana... The purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. (Satan) is happy toand possess it."

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That sounds like a pretty unequivocal statement of principle.

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But Jackson now says his words were misinterpreted. "What I said was that Christian meditation does not involve emptying oneself but filling oneself," Jackson said in an unusual 45-minute press conference on Wednesday, the  reports. He even said one of his ministers is a yoga instructor.

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Jackson told reporters he was spilling all to "maybe save you and your colleagues some further research." He is a former preacher who has not held higher office, as his tell-all press conference might suggest. Jackson revealed at the event that when he was younger, he experimented with marijuana and other, unnamed controlled substances. He filed for bankruptcy in 1993 when his gospel radio station in Boston did not pan out. He said he'd faced tax liens for unpaid taxes in the past. He admitted he was asked to leave his first preaching job in 1982. "It was an older congregation and I was a young 27-year-old firebrand. It was not a good mix," Jackson said.

Over the last few weeks, some of Jackson's more unusual comments have surfaced, like that gays are "ikky," that President Obama has a "Muslim perspective," that evolution isn't real , and that in vitro fertilization is . While many of his past comments are offensive, I am disappointed that Jackson took himself out of the fight against the soft tyranny of purple stretch jersey in order to pander to yoga monsters.

(Photo byvia Flickr.)

March 12, 1975: A passenger plane, operated by Air Vietnam, crashed into Vietnamese territory after being hit by a MANPAD, killing 26 passengers and crew.

Sept. 3, 1978: An Air Rhodesia Vickers 782D Viscount passenger airliner crash-landed after being hit by a MANPAD, fired by forces from the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, killing 34 of the 56 passengers.

Dec. 19, 1988: Polisario Front fighters opened fire on two DC-7s chartered by USAID to spray for locusts over Morocco. One crashed, killing all five crew onboard.

Sept. 22, 1993: An aircraft operated by Transair Georgia was shot down by Abkhazian separatist forces. It crashed onto the runway and caught fire, killing 108.

April 6, 1994: An executive jet carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and its French flight crew was shot down over Kigali, killing all aboard and sparking massive ethnic violence which marked the beginning of the Rwandan genocide.

Oct. 10, 1998: A Boeing Lignes Aeriennes Congolaises airliner was downed over the Congolese jungle by Tutsi militia, killing 41.

Dec. 26, 1998: A U.N.-chartered C-130 Hercules was shot down over Angola by UNITA forces, killing 14.

Jan. 2, 1999: A U.N. Hercules transport plane was shot down by UNITA forces in Angola, killing nine.

Nov. 28, 2002: Gunmen fire two MANPADS at a Boeing jet carrying 271 passengers and crew as it took off from Mombasa, Kenya. Both missiles missed.

Nov. 22, 2003: A DHL Airbus cargo jet transporting mail in Iraq was struck and damaged by a MANPAD. Though hit in the left fuel tank, the plane was able to return to the Baghdad airport and land safely.

March 23, 2007: An Ilyushin cargo plane was shot down over Mogadishu, Somalia, killing the entire crew of 11.

(Source: U.S. State Department)

Japan's Nikkei fell 6.4 percent to close at 12,445.38, a drop of 21 percent from its high in May. When an index falls by more than 20 percent from a high, it is commonly defined as a bear market.

Analysts said speculators are fleeing the Nikkei after the Bank of Japan's decision earlier in the week to refrain from additional monetary easing measures.

European stocks initially fell sharply in reaction to the losses in Japan and after the World Bank cut its forecast for global growth in 2013 to 2.2 percent from 2.4 percent.

But they recovered, and Wall Street traded higher, after U.S. Commerce Department figures showed retail sales rose 0.6 percent in May, the strongest showing in three months.

IG Markets strategist Alastair McCaig said markets were also helped by a fall in unemployment benefit applications, which came in at 334,000, near five-year lows.

"Like almost all the major global indices, the Dow, S&P 500 and NASDAQ have all had a negative few weeks of trading, but... as at this stage it appears more like U.S. markets have blown some of the froth off the top rather than changed sentiment," he said in a note.

By mid-morning in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial index was up 0.3 percent, rising above the 15,000 mark to 15,045.40, while the S&P 500 index rose 0.4 percent to 1,619.44.

Britain's FSTE 100 gained 0.1 percent to 6,304.63 and France's CAC-40 was up the same percentage to 3,797.98. Germany's DAX closed 0.6 percent lower at 8,095.39.

Among notable losers in Europe was Royal Bank of Scotland, PLC, down 3.3 percent on the news CEO Stephen Hester will resign and the bank will cut 2,000 jobs.

Market sentiment has worsened generally since the chief of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said the central bank might pull back on its $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program known as quantitative easing if U.S. economic data, especially hiring, improves.

"Ever since talk of Fed tapering was first mentioned U.S. bond yields have edged higher and money has leaked out of emerging markets and emerging market currencies," said market analyst Michael Hewson of CMC Markets.

Investors now expect some reduction in the Fed's monthly asset purchases sometime this year. Fed stimulus has been one of the main reasons why many assets, such as global stock markets and emerging markets, have rallied in recent months.

Analysts said markets will likely remain on edge until next week's Fed policy meeting for greater clarity on the timing and extent of any tapering.

"Mr Bernanke is riding a tiger he dare not dismount" for fear of disrupting the global recovery, said Stephan Lewis of Monument Securities.

Juichi Wako, equity market strategist at Nomura Securities Co. in Tokyo, said the drop on the Nikkei was due to a reversal of the money flow that had flooded Japan in recent months, partly on inflated hopes for "Abenomics," as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's fiscal and monetary policies have been dubbed.

In April, the Bank of Japan announced a massive stimulus in an attempt to encourage economic growth and get inflation up to 2 percent. The euphoria drove the Nikkei up to five-year highs, briefly.

Excitement is now ebbing, Wako said, and the yen is strengthening a headwind for Japanese exporters.

The dollar weakened sharply against the yen, to 94.42 yen from 95.71 yen the day before.

Elsewhere in Asia, the Hang Seng index fell 2.2 percent to 20,887.04, while the Kospi in South Korea lost 1.4 percent to 1,882.73.

Mainland Chinese were pummeled as accumulating signs of a slowdown in growth in the world's No. 2 economy caused investors to retreat. The Shanghai Composite Index slid 2.8 percent to 2,148.36, its lowest close in six months.

In other markets, the euro dropped to $1.3317 from $1.3331 late Wednesday, while the benchmark crude oil contract was down 5 cents to $95.83 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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AP Business Writers Pamela Sampson in Bangkok, Elaine Kurtenbach in Tokyo and Toby Sterling in Amsterdam contributed to this report. Researcher Fu Ting contributed from Shanghai.

Follow Kurtenbach on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ekurtenbach

The all-new single-aisle CSeries is Bombardier's biggest plane to date, and industry watchers have been keen to know the timing of the move to the test center, viewing it as the latest sign that the aircraft is on track for its first flight.

"It has moved to the flight test center. It moved over actually this week," Robert Dewar, vice-president and general manager of the Bombardier CSeries program, said in an interview.

The narrow-body CSeries will now undergo tests that can't be done in the hanger, said Dewar.

Bombardier, which has been developing the CSeries for five years, delayed the maiden flight by six months late last year because of problems with suppliers.

It says it expects the plane to be in service in 2014.

(Reporting by Solarina Ho; editing by Andrew Hay)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Goldman Sachs Group IncVice President Fabrice Tourre lost a bid to limit a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission civil fraud case against him over a transaction that led to a $550 million settlement by the Wall Street bank.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan on Tuesday rejected Tourre's argument that a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision limiting the reach of U.S. securities laws required the SEC to narrow its case.

The decision is a victory for the SEC and gives it "a stronger tool to go after people who offer securities in the United States, regardless of where the recipient of the offer was located at the time," according to Angelo Savino, a partner at Cozen O'Connor who leads its professional liability practice.

The SEC had accused Goldman and Tourre in a 2010 lawsuit of failing to tell investors that Paulson & Co, the hedge fund run by billionaire John Paulson, helped choose and then bet against risky mortgage-backed securities underlying a collateralized debt obligation they marketed and sold, Abacus 2007-AC1.

Goldman in 2010 agreed to pay $550 million to settle its part of the case, without admitting wrongdoing. Tourre, now a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago, chose to fight the charges, with Goldman paying his legal fees.

Tourre had argued that fraud allegations concerning the offering of parts of Abacus to two non-U.S. purchasers, IKB Deutsche Industriebank AGand ABN AMRO Bank NV, were not governed by U.S. securities laws.

His argument was rooted in a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd , limiting the non-U.S. reach of a key fraud law.

But Forrest said that while Morrison also applied to a law that bans fraud "in the offer or sale of any securities," she said a "domestic offer" could give rise to a fraud claim "regardless of whether it results in a sale."

She said the SEC could pursue this claim against Tourre because a reasonable jury could find that he had conducted a domestic offer, having worked in New York at all relevant times, including when he communicated with IKB and ABN.

Forrest also ruled in favor of the SEC on other parts of the case, including the sale of credit protection by third-party ACA LLC on $909 million of Abacus securities, while denying other parts of its request for partial summary judgment.

A trial is scheduled for July 15.

FABULOUS FAB

Pamela Chepiga, a lawyer for Tourre, said in a statement: "The central point in today's ruling is that the SEC's attempt to win the case without a trial has failed. We look forward to a trial on the merits that will vindicate Mr. Tourre."

SEC spokesman Kevin Callahan said the regulator is pleased with the decision and looks forward to a trial.

Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment. The bank is not a defendant in the case.

Tourre had gained notoriety in the case for having referred to himself in an email as "fabulous Fab."

Paulson's firm made about $1 billion from Abacus, which the SEC said cost other investors more than $1 billion.

Forrest has yet to rule on other parts of the case, including the extent to which the SEC may refer at trial to the 2008 financial crisis and to Goldman's $550 million settlement.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones, who had overseen the case before leaving the bench, in 2011 cited the Morrison decision in dismissing some claims against Tourre over IKB and ABN Amro.

The case is SEC v. Tourre, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 10-03229.

(Reporting by Bernard Vaughan and Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Dan Grebler and Leslie Adler)

The study shows that dogs split from gray wolves about 32,000 years ago, and that since then, domestic dogs' brains and digestive organs have evolved in ways very similar to the brains and organs of humans.

The findings suggest a more ancient origin forthan previously suggested. They also hint that a common environment drove both dog and human evolution for thousands of years.

"As domestication is often associated with large increases in population density and crowded living conditions, these 'unfavorable' environments might be the selective pressure that drove the rewiring of both species," the researchers wrote in their article, published today (May 14) in the journal Nature Communications.

First domestication

It isn't clear precisely when wolves were tamed and transformed into man's best friend, and the date has been hotly debated. An ancient, doglike skull uncovered in the Siberian Mountains suggested that thearound 33,000 years ago from gray wolves. But genetic analysis suggested dogs in China were domesticated only about 16,000 years ago.

In any case, most researchers agree that by about 10,000 years ago, dogs were firmly ensconced in human society. []

Some studies show that the wild dogs of South China may have been the first domesticated canines.

To understand this domestication, Guo-dong Wang, a genetics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of four , three indigenous Chinese dogs and a German shepherd, a Belgian Malinois and a Tibetan mastiff.

The DNA suggests that the gray wolves split off from the indigenous dogs about 32,000 years ago, the researchers said.

"Chinese indigenous dogs might represent the missing link in dog domestication," the researchers write in the paper.

Since then, dogs' evolution has been gradual, and there were no sharp decreases in the dog population over time, suggesting dogs gradually became domesticated, after many years of scavenging from humans.

Parallel evolution

The team then compared corresponding genes in dogs and humans. They found both species underwent similar changes in genes responsible for digestion and metabolism, such as genes that code fortransport. Those changes could be due to a dramatic change in the proportion of animal versus plant-based foods that occurred in both at around the same time, the researchers said.

The team also found co-evolution in several brain processes for instance, in genes that affect the processing of the brain chemical serotonin. In humans, variations in these genes affect levels of aggression. (This shared genetic trajectory might explain why Fluffy can be helped by antidepressant drugs, the authors hypothesize.)

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HAY-ON-WYE, Wales (Reuters) - Prices of the rarest books are rising as the Internet drives the trade off dusty shelves and into the digital age, a leading expert said this weekend.

Matthew Haley, head of the books, manuscripts and photographs department at auction house Bonhams in London, said the rise of online catalogues and aggregators of booksellers' stock meant more collectors were aware when a rare find came on the market.

"More people can find it and there is only one of them around," he told an audience at the Hay Festival, adding this was pushing prices of the rare and the one-off higher.

At the same time, demand was growing for what he termed "quirkiana" or books on specialist, niche topics.

"We see that the mid-rank is really the struggling area of the market, which in our terms would be books between 100 pounds and a thousand," Haley said.

Into this category he put books that, while rare, were not unique, and modern first editions as potential purchasers could scour the web for other examples more easily than in the past.

With prices rising at the top and bottom of the market but easing in the middle, the overall value of the market was holding at up to $600 million a year, he said.

Haley said the outlook for second-hand bookshops, which he said were closing "at a tremendous rate", was not good.

"I fear that we are going to see the end of the serendipity of browsing through a bookshop and finding a book you didn't know you wanted," he said.

He said some in the industry forecast digital books would outsell printed books in Britain in 2015. Yet the shift to digital publishing only made physical books more alluring to many people.

"There is no substitute for handling a book," he said, adding many people still treasured the feel of crisp paper or the smell of an old volume.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

LONDON (Reuters) - The new strain of bird flu that has killed 17 people in China has been circulating widely "under the radar" and has acquired significant genetic diversity that makes it more of a threat, scientists said on Friday.

Dutch and Chinese researchers who analyzed genetic data from seven samples of the new H7N9 strain say it has already acquired similar levels of genetic diversity as much larger outbreaks of other H7 strains of flu seen previously in birds.

"The diversity we see in these first few samples from China is as great as the diversity we have seen with a large outbreak in the Netherlands several years ago and one in Italy," said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who worked on the study as part of a nine-member team.

"This means it (the H7N9 strain in China) has been spreading quite a bit and it's important to understand where exactly that is going on."

Its genetic diversity shows the virus has an ability to mutate repeatedly and is likely to continue doing so, raising the risk that it may become transmissible among humans.

Koopmans, whose research was published in the online journal Eurosurveillance, said the circulation would probably have taken place in either birds or mammals, but said exactly which animals were involved was not yet clear.

"Simply the fact that this virus is spreading under the radar - because that is what this data confirms - is of concern," she told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The H7N9 virus is so far known to have infected 87 people in China, killing 17 of them. Health officials raised further questions on Friday about the source of the new strain after data indicated that more than half of patients had had no contact with poultry.

MUTATIONS

A scientific study published last week showed the H7N9 strain was a so-called "triple reassortant" virus with a mixture of genes from three other flu strains found in birds in Asia. One of those three strains is thought to have come from a brambling, a type of small wild bird.

For their study, Koopmans and her team compared some data from the first two weeks of the China H7N9 outbreak with data from a large H7N7 flu outbreak in birds and people the Netherlands in 2003 and an H7N1 epidemic in birds in Italy in 1999 and 2000.

The Dutch outbreak resulted in infection of poultry on 255 farms and led to the culling of about 30 million chickens. Some 89 people were also diagnosed as having the H7N7 virus and one person, a vet, died as a result of the infection.

The comparison suggested that "widespread circulation (of the H7N9 strain in China) must have occurred, resulting in major genetic diversification", the researchers wrote in their study.

They added: "Such diversification is of concern, given that several markers associated with increased risk for public health are already present."

Flu experts in China and at the World Health Organization say there is no evidence so far that H7N9 is passing easily between people.

But scientists who analyzed the genetic sequence data from three early samples from China say the virus has already acquired some mutations that might make it more likely to be able to do so in the future, raising the risk of a human pandemic.

"Although human infections with H7 influenza viruses have occurred repeatedly over the last decades without evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, the absence of sustained human-to-human transmission of H7N9 viruses does not come with any guarantee," Koopmans' team wrote in their study.

(Editing by Ben Hirschler and Alison Williams)