LONDON (Reuters) - Prince Philip, the 91-year-old husband of the Queen, is making satisfactory progress in hospital after an operation on Friday, a royal spokesman said.

His wife of 65 years carried on with her official engagements, visiting state broadcaster, the BBC, just half a mile from the central London hospital where the operation took place.

Philip, who turns 92 next week, was admitted to the London Clinic on Thursday and is expected to remain for two weeks after what Buckingham Palace described as "an exploratory operation following abdominal investigations".

"The results will now be analysed," the palace said in a statement. "At this early stage he is progressing satisfactorily."

It was the fourth time Prince Philip, also known as the Duke of Edinburgh, has undergone hospital treatment since Christmas 2011.

Philip was admitted to hospital during the queen's Diamond Jubilee last year with a bladder infection.

The 87-year-old queen visited the BBC's newly opened headquarters alone on Friday. She left without making public reference to Philip's hospital stay.

Philip was taken to the London Clinic by appointment after attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace with the queen. Television footage showed him in a grey top hat and tails, smiling and chatting with guests.

Prime Minister David Cameron described Philip as an "extraordinarily dedicated public servant and such an enormous support for our sovereign".

"The whole country will be thinking about him, thinking about the family and wishing him well," Cameron told reporters.

Married in 1947, Philip - the son of the exiled Prince Andrew of Greece - is renowned in Britain for his outspoken comments and off-the-cuff remarks.

Against a backdrop of trumpets and cheering crowds, the queen and Philip were joined by 2,000 guests at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday to celebrate 60 years since her coronation.

(Additional reporting by Mark Anderson and Peter Griffiths; Editing by Stephen Addison and Robin Pomeroy)

PRETORIA (Reuters) - A South African judge postponed the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius on Tuesday and criticized the media for sensationalist reporting of the Olympic and Paralympic athletics star's shooting of his girlfriend on Valentine's Day.

Pistorius, 26, remained composed throughout the 10-minute hearing at the Pretoria Magistrates Court when he made his first formal public appearance since his release on bail in February. He was driven away afterwards in a sports utility vehicle with tinted windows.

The double amputee, nicknamed "Blade Runner" for his prosthetic racing legs, has admitted killing Reeva Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model, by firing four shots through a locked toilet door on February 14 at his plush Pretoria home.

Dressed in a dark suit, shirt and tie, his only words in court were "Yes, Your Honor" when asked if he understood the bail conditions.

Judge Daniel Thulare postponed the case until August 19, which would have been Steenkamp's 30th birthday, after prosecutors asked for more time to prepare their case. They did not provide details.

Thulare also took a swipe at domestic and international media coverage of the case, branding it "scandalizing, contemptuous actions".

"It appears there is a trial by media," Thulare told the court.

He urged journalists to "preserve the sanctity of the fountains of justice."

In the most recent incident, Britain's Sky News broadcast photos said to have been taken inside Pistorius' home shortly after the shooting. The images showed blood-spattered walls and blood pools on the bathroom floor. Police said they were investigating the leak.

South Africa does not have trial by jury so pre-trial media coverage is seldom deemed to be prejudicial.

In testimony at the February bail hearing, his lawyers said the shooting was a tragic mistake and Pistorius was acting in self-defense against what he thought was an intruder.

Prosecutors accused him of premeditated murder for firing into the door, hitting Steenkamp in the head, hip and arm. Bail was set in February at 1 million rand, which is about $100,000

FALL FROM GRACE

The case has garnered enormous attention because of his remarkable life story and fall from grace. In South Africa, he was a hero for black and white people alike, transcending the racial divides that persist 19 years after the end of apartheid.

In August last year, he carried the South African flag at the London Olympics, the games at which he confirmed his hero status by becoming to the first double-amputee to compete against able-bodied athletes.

He reached the semi-final of the 400 meters.

Six months later, he was a broken man, weeping uncontrollably in court after being accused of murder.

Pistorius was born without fibula, the bone that runs below the knee joint and down to the ankle. He had his legs amputated below the knee at the age of 11 months.

He first competed with able-bodied athletes in July 2007 in Rome but the International Association of Athletics Associations (IAAF) later suspended him on the grounds that his blades gave him an unfair advantage. He challenged the ban and in May 2008, the Court of Arbitration for sport ruled in his favor.

He won three gold medals in the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing and two golds in London last year.

But since the killing, his lucrative endorsement deals with the likes of sporting goods maker Nike have been suspended and his millions of admirers around the world have questioned the faith they had put in him.

Pistorius has kept out of the public eye since he secured bail. Media reported that in April he partied at a nightclub in a Johannesburg suburb after his bail conditions were relaxed the previous month.

The Pistorius camp said the matter was blown out of proportion and he went out for a quiet dinner with friends after spending weeks in the house with family.

He has been living with family since his release on bail, praying and rediscovering his Christian faith, his family members have said.

"He's battling, but with his family behind him, with his sister living in the same house as he lives at Aimee. They assist him a lot, and we are preparing him," his uncle Arnold Pistorius, a family spokesman, told local broadcaster ENCA.

Paralympic gold medalist Samkelo Radebe told Reuters TV: "We still stand behind him you know, we still want to see him come back and run and do what he's well known for and that's being a hero and changing people's lives"

(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Ed Cropley and Angus MacSwan)

The docking took place at 8:10 a.m. (0210 GMT, 10:10 p.m. EDT) less than six hours after the Russian spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which Russia leases in Kazakhstan.

Live footage provided by NASA TV showed it soaring into the clear night sky. About four minutes later, the announcer said the Soyuz was traveling at 4,700 miles per hour (about 7,500 kilometers per hour).

The cramped capsule carrying NASA's Karen Nyberg, Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and Italy's Luca Parmitano orbited the Earth four times before docking with the space station.

After docking, two hours passed before pressure equalized between the capsule and the station, allowing safe entry.

The three new arrivals were greeted by NASA's Chris Cassidy and Russians Alexander Misurkin and the station's commander Pavel Vinogradov, who have been aboard the space station since late March.

"It was a pretty cool ride," Nyberg said upon arrival.

Cassidy had shaved his head clean to match Parmitano's look and got a thumbs-up from the Italian.

Yurchikhin, 54, is a veteran of three previous spaceflights, while the 36-year-old Parmitano, a former test pilot, is making his first trip into space. Nyberg, 43, spent two weeks in space in 2008 as part of a U.S. space shuttle crew.

Shortly after their arrival, the incoming team spoke via video link with their relatives and officials back in Baikonur. Parmitano's mother wept throughout the chat with her son.

Four spacewalks are planned during the expedition, including what NASA said would be the first by an Italian.

The International Space Station is the biggest orbiting outpost ever built and can sometimes be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It consists of more than a dozen modules built by the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Knee pain appears to decrease up to one year after "prolotherapy," a series of sugar water injections at the site of the pain, according to a new study.

Previous research on the therapy that suggested positive effects was plagued by flaws, but the new report may be more reliable, according to Dr. John D. Loeser, a pain specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"This is a well-performed clinical trial that deals with many of the issues that have clouded prior reports of prolotherapy," Loeser, who was not involved in the study and has spoken out against the practice in the past, told Reuters Health in an email.

Knee osteoarthritis is common, especially among people over 65, but no single therapy has proven particularly beneficial.

In prolotherapy, which costs $200 to $1000 per session and is not covered by Medicare, small amounts of solution are injected at multiple painful ligament and tendon locations in the knee over several sessions. The hope is that a new minor irritation will stimulate the body to repair both old damage and new.

"The idea is to stimulate a local healing reaction," lead author Dr. David Rabago, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, told Reuters Health.

Rabago and his colleagues divided 90 people with knee osteoarthritis and between ages 40 and 76 years old into three groups: one got sugar-water prolotherapy injections, another got salt-water placebo injections, and the third was instructed in at-home exercise and received no injections.

The first two groups got injections at least three times, sometimes more if they asked for it, over 17 weeks, and were followed for one year.

The sugar water group reported better knee function, improving 16 points on a 100-point scale of osteoarthritis severity, compared to 5 points for saline and 7 points for the exercise group.

The sugar water group also reported less frequent and less severe pain, improving 14 points on the same scale, at one year, while the salt water and exercise groups improved 7 points and 9 points, respectively.

The study was small but not too small and included the right type of subjects: typical sufferers of knee osteoarthritis, researchers said.

One of the things that has held back previous studies of prolotherapy is the difficulty of mimicking the injections for a placebo group without actually injecting them with something - that makes it difficult to tell what's causing the improvements, the sugar water itself or the needle stick, bleeding or stretching the tissue, which can all have effects.

"The best one can do is control' for those effects by testing an agent against a similar treatment and varying only one thing, which is what we did," Rabago said.

But since the salt water group and the exercise-only groups had similar results, the benefit was probably not a placebo response, Loeser said.

"This study yields results that are more favorable than other carefully controlled studies of prolotherapy in other regions," Loeser said.

But there are a lot of questions to answer before this becomes widely adopted, he cautioned.

"Certainly, additional studies are needed before one accepts prolotherapy as standard treatment for knee OA," Loeser said.

Researchers don't yet know how long the pain benefit will persist after one year.

But Rabago said, "These results support its use as routine care for knee OA in patients who have not improved with more conservative measures." Though he doesn't yet know how prolotherapy works, he added that he would recommend the treatment for a member of his own family.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/ZbSdSw Annals of Family Medicine, online May 1, 2013.

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) -- A shadowy electronic currency that underpins a large chunk of the cybercrime economy has been knocked out by law enforcement action on two continents, police in Costa Rica said late Monday.

Concern had been building on underground Internet forums since Liberty Reserve, a Latin America-based currency system long favored by scammers, went offline last week. In a statement, Costa Rica police confirmed that the company founder Arthur Budovsky had been arrested in Spain on money laundering charges Friday and that several premises linked to his company had been raided.

A notice pasted across Liberty Reserve's website said the domain "has been seized by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team."

Liberty Reserve's demise is likely to send a sharp shock across the Internet.

"It was one the most popular currencies for cybercriminals," said Aditya Sood, a computer science doctoral candidate at Michigan State University who has studied the underground economy.

Sood said Liberty Reserve operates as a no-questions-asked alternative to the global banking system, with little more than a valid email needed to open an account and start moving money across borders.

"You don't need to provide your full details, or personal information, or things like that," he said in a telephone interview. "There's no way to trace an account. That's the beauty of the system."

People using Liberty Reserve rely in part on offshore currency centers, generally set up in places beyond the reach of U.S. or European law enforcement, which broker transactions moving cash in and out of the mainstream financial system. Like other cybercurrencies, Liberty Reserve has many legitimate users, but the promise of untraceable transactions has long made it attractive to scammers.

Sood said that despite prominent disclaimers warning against money laundering, the way Liberty Reserve was set up meant that currency centers typically had little in the way of serious oversight.

"Cybercriminals don't provide their real credentials," Sood said, leaving brokers in the dark about who was sending what where.

"They have no idea where the money is coming from or where the money is going," he said. "That's how they designed the model."

Liberty Reserve appears to have played an important role in laundering the proceeds from the recent theft of some $45 million from two Middle Eastern banks, according to legal documents made public by U.S. authorities earlier this month.

The complaint against one of the Dominican Republic gang members allegedly involved in the theft states that thousands of dollars' worth of stolen cash was deposited into two Liberty Reserve accounts via currency centers based in Siberia and Singapore.

The Costa Rica police statement said that they raided three homes and five businesses linked to Liberty Reserve and seized papers and digital documents that will be turned over to U.S. authorities.

Budovsky, who became a Costa Rican national after giving up his U.S. citizenship, has been in trouble before, the statement added, explaining that he was sentenced in 2007 to five years' probation after pleading guilty in a New York court to charges he operated an illegal financial services business similar to Liberty Reserve.

U.S. authorities didn't return phone messages from The Associated Press seeking comment Monday, which was a public holiday in the United States.

Sood said there might be a short term drop in cybercrime activity as scammers who used to rely on Liberty Reserve readjusted their finances, but he cautioned that new forms of cybercurrency would soon take its place.

"Even if one system is taken down, we can't expect that there will be no more systems," he said.

___

Satter reported from London. Alan Clendenning in Madrid contributed to this report.

"A savage capitalism has taught the logic of profit at any cost, of giving in order to get, of exploitation without thinking of people... and we see the results in the crisis we are experiencing," the pope said.

Francis greeted the men and women coming to the 'Gift of Maria' food kitchen, located at the walls of the Vatican.

The first non-European pontiff in centuries, the Argentine-born pope last week called for financial reform, condemning a "dictatorship of the economy" and a "cult of money".

Francis has set a simpler style for the papacy since taking office in March, shunning traditional ornate garments and living in a guest house instead of the Apostolic Palace. He has said he wants the 1.2-billion-member Catholic Church to defend the poor and to be more austere itself.

(Reporting by Naomi O'Leary; Editing by Michael Roddy)

(Logo: )

UT Arlington will gain insight into training offered at a Voluntary Protection Programs certified site, while JSC hopes to better understand industry-focused training as the agency prepares for increased partnerships with commercial companies in the future.

William "Bill" McArthur, Jr., director of Safety and Mission Assurance at JSC, and John Hall, UT Arlington vice president for Administration and Campus Operations, signed a Space Act Agreement in a ceremony at Space Center Houston May 23. Afterward, a technical interchange meeting was held to begin development of a framework to audit environmental, health and safety classes and to determine leading practices.

Ultimately, the benchmarking activities will enhance training quality and knowledge sharing of environmental, health and safety provided to JSC's various constituencies. Elmer "Bubba" Johnson, JSC's Program Assessment Team lead, and Teresea Madden-Thompson, UT Arlington associate vice president, will coordinate technical activities.

"With more than 20 years of experience training NASA personnel, the NASA Safety Training Center provides training using standards unique and unobtainable from any other sources," McArthur said.

"The agency's current focus on partnering with commercial companies to achieve its mission requires evaluating new approaches to our training methods," McArthur added. "This agreement creates an opportunity for NASA to benchmark with UT Arlington to identify best practices and obtain feedback to ensure that we offer the best training to our personnel."

Hall said the agreement creates an opportunity for the University to help shape training opportunities in the aerospace industry and its reach in the professional development sector.

"We are proud of this new partnership with NASA Johnson Space Center, and we look forward to sharing our expertise in professional education and training with an agency that sets the standard for innovation," Hall said.

Madden said the agreement will position UT Arlington's Division for Enterprise Development for new opportunities with governmental agencies.

"We look forward to learning from NASA's expertise as well," Madden-Thompson said. "We will build on this expertise to create educational and training programs that will benefit the Division of Enterprise Development's other clients and support NASA's commitment to environmental, health and safety."

The NASA Safety Training Center (NSTC) at JSC was established in May 1991 by the NASA Headquarters Office of Safety and Mission Assurance to provide up-to-date, high-quality, NASA-specific safety training on location to NASA centers, or simultaneously to multiple centers through video teleconferencing in the pursuit of the ultimate goal of safe operations for NASA. The NSTC provides safety, as well as, mission success and mission unique training that enable agency personnel to meet uniform engineering and technical requirements for processes, procedures, practices and methods that have been endorsed as a standard for NASA programs and projects.

The UT Arlington Division for Enterprise Development provides professional development, technical assistance and training to public and private organizations in Texas and the nation. The division consists of several units that serve environmental, health and safety training and education needs across the public and private sectors. They include the U.S. Department of Labor federally approved Region VI OSHA Education Center, the Center for Environmental Excellence, Environmental Training Institute and the Public Works Training Institute. UTA is a research institution of more than 33,800 students and 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas.

For more information about NASA and its programs, visit:

Learn more about the University of Texas Arlington here:

For pictures from the signing ceremony, visit:

SOURCE NASA

The prestigious Institute of Medicine is recommending that schools provide opportunities for at least 60 minutes of physical activity each day for students and that PE become a core subject.

The report, released Thursday, says only about half of the nation's youngsters are getting at least an hour of vigorous or moderate-intensity physical activity every day.

Another concern, the report says, is that 44 percent of school administrators report slashing big chunks of time from physical education, arts and recess since the passage of the No Child Left Behind law in 2001 in order to boost classroom time for reading and math.

With childhood obesity on the rise about 17 percent of children ages 2 through 19 are obese and kids spending much of the day in the classroom, the chairman of the committee that wrote the report said schools are the best place to help shape up the nation's children.

"Schools for years have been responsible for various health programs such as nutrition, breakfast and lunch, immunizations, screenings," Harold W. Kohl III, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas School of Public Health, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"Physical activity should be placed alongside those programs to make it a priority for us as a society," he said.

The report calls on the Education Department to recommend that PE be adopted as a core subject.

It says physical education in school is the "only sure opportunity" for youngsters to have access to activity that will help keep them healthy.

The majority of states, about 75 percent, mandate PE, according to the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance. But most do not require a specific amount of time for PE in school, and more than half allow exemptions or substitutions, such as marching band, cheerleading and community sports.

Many kids also aren't going to gym class at school every single day. According to the CDC, only about 30 percent of students nationwide attend PE classes five days a week.

Specifically, the report recommends:

All elementary school students should spend an average of 30 minutes each day in PE class.

Middle and high school students should spend an average of 45 minutes each day in PE class.

State and local officials should find ways get children more physical activity in the school environment.

PE isn't the sole solution, though.

The report advocates a "whole-of-school" approach where recess and before-and-after-school activities including sports are made accessible to all students to help achieve the 60-minutes-a-day recommendation for physical activity. It could be as simple as having kids walk or bike to school, or finding ways to add a physical component to math and science class lessons.

The report also cautions against taking away recess as a form of punishment, and it urges schools to give students frequent classroom breaks.

Schools can do this if they make it a priority, said Paul Roetert, CEO of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance.

"We have an obligation to keep kids active," Roetert said in an interview. "We have research to show that physical activity helps kids perform better in school. It helps them focus better in the classroom ... and they behave better in school. So there are all kinds of side benefits."

Kitty Porterfield, spokeswoman for The School Superintendents Association, said nobody is opposed to physical education.

"Everybody would love to see more of it in schools," said Porterfield. "Given the testing and academic pressures for excellence on schools, often physical education slides to the bottom of the barrel."

The idea of putting more of an emphasis on physical education in schools has support in Congress.

Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, plans to introduce the PHYSICAL Act on Thursday. It would recognize health education and physical education as core subjects within elementary and secondary schools. Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Jared Polis, D-Colo., will join Fudge as co-sponsors.