Reshma Begum had vowed never again to work in a garment factory after she was rescued from the wreckage of the eight-story Rana Plaza building, where 1,129 people were killed in April in the world's worst garment industry disaster.

Begum, whose tale of survival in a wide pocket beneath the debris has made her a celebrity in Bangladesh, fielded job offers from many companies before accepting work at the Westin Hotel in Dhaka, said Maj. Gen. Chowdhury Hasan Suhrawardy, the local military chief overseeing her care.The Westin's manager, Azim Shah, said Begum would work in the housekeeping department as a "Public Area Ambassador." Hotel officials said she would talk to guests, but they did not elaborate on her responsibilities.

Authorities at the military hospital where Begum was treated said she was fully recovered, and she looked fine Thursday as she spoke briefly to the media.

"I am OK now, doing fine. I am grateful to everybody," she said.

She then left the hospital in a silver van headed for the hotel.

Begum, who earned 4,700 takas ($60) a month at one of the factories in Rana Plaza, suffered a head injury in the collapse.

She survived in the refuge beneath the rubble by rationing out cookies and water she had with her.

The Rana Plaza tragedy has created global pressure for reform in the Bangladeshi garment industry.

Resident Ali Cisse said the explosion occurred around 11 a.m. in the Aliou neighborhood of Kidal, the same district where last week an unidentified gunman opened fire on a French convoy, lightly wounding a French soldier. Cisse said the man ran into a house not far from the residence of Iyad Ag Ghali, leader of Ansar Dine, a local jihadist group working with al-Qaida's North African chapter. Ansar Dine was chased out of northern Mali by French forces in January.

Cisse said the bomber couldn't be identified because his body was torn to bits by the explosion.

For the study, researchers looked at weather patterns in 2007, whencovering the Arctic Ocean hit one of its lowest summer extents since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s.

In fall and winter, when sea ice would normally insulate the ocean from frigid Arctic air temperatures, the small ice pack meant lots of heat could escape from the ocean into the atmosphere, the study found. The heating changed , said lead study author Elizabeth Cassano, a climate scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colo. The results were published May 21 in the International Journal of Climatology.

"What we saw, particularly in the fall and winter, was a decrease in [atmospheric] pressure over the areas of open water," Cassano told LiveScience. Areas of high and low pressure drive weather, with low pressure producing stormier weather and high pressure leading to clear, calm days, Cassano said. The group's computer model generally agreed with weather records from the latter half of 2007, according to the study.

While thehad a significant effect into the winter, there was little change in weather patterns in early 2007, before the ice pack shrank, the study found. However, Cassano points out that the climate model doesn't include a major high-pressure system that was in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and played a role in the big ice melt. Its absence could affect the modeling results.

The researchers now plan to examine how the feedback between sea ice and the atmosphere alters weather in the United State and other regions, Cassano said. "There's an open question of how these changes that we see in the Arctic influence the weather that we see here in the mid-latitudes," she said.

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(Reuters) - Fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer died on Sunday in Palm Beach, Florida, at age 81, her company said.

Pulitzer was known for her bright, cheerful print shift dresses that were popular with socialites and evoked a lifestyle of affluence in Florida and New York's Hamptons resorts.

Her company, named Lilly Pulitzer, also made children's wear, men's wear and household goods, often based on the same prints and bright colors.

"Early this morning, Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau passed away peacefully in Palm Beach, surrounded by family and loved ones," her company said in a statement posted on Facebook. "Lilly has been a true inspiration to us and we will miss her.

"Lilly was a true original who has brought together generations through her bright and happy mark on the world," the statement said.

It did not disclose a cause of death.

Pulitzer's designs were born when she was running a juice stand in Florida and had a sleeveless dress made from colorful printed cotton to hide the juice stains, according to the company website.

She had eloped at age 21 with publishing heir Peter Pulitzer and moved to Palm Beach, "in the shadow of Peter's citrus groves," from New York City, it said. The couple later divorced.

The classic shift dress gained international attention when first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, a former classmate of Pulitzer's, was photographed wearing one of her dresses on vacation, it said.

Her company declared bankruptcy in 1984 but was relaunched in 1992.

She and Pulitzer had three children, according to People magazine. Her second husband was hotelier Enrique Rousseau who died in 1993, according to People.

(Editing by Sandra Maler)

The fourth seed Bruins closed out the series 4-1 against the sixth seeded Rangers to set up the showdown with the top-seeded Penguins for a place in the Stanley Cup Finals.

It is their first trip back to the Eastern Finals since the 2010-11 season where they went on to win the Stanley Cup.

Boston fell behind after Dan Girardi scored a power-play goal in the opening period but 22-year-old Torey Krug continued his strong post-season with a power-play goal of his own after three minutes of the second period.

It was Krug's fourth goal in his first five play-off games and sparked the Bruins into action.

Gregory Campbell snapped the tie with a goal 10 minutes later and he added a second goal in the dying seconds of the game when he managed to backhand the puck into an empty net despite being hooked right before the attempt.

"It was a tough series. They played hard and they are really similar to us," Campbell said.

"It was a physical series and most games could have gone either way but we fought hard."

Bruins goaltender Tuukka Rask saved 28 of 29 shots. (Reporting by Ben Everill in Del Mar; Editing by Greg Stutchbury)

(Reuters) - GameStop Corp raised the lower end of its full-year earnings forecast on Thursday after beating fourth-quarter estimates, counting on a boost from new gaming consoles due later this year and further growth in digital and mobile sales.

The videogame industry, which has struggled with declining sales as gamers migrate to mobile and social media platforms, is hoping for a strong finish to 2013 with the release of new titles like Take-Two Interactive Software's "Grand Theft Auto V" and Electronic Arts Inc's "Battlefield 4."

New gaming consoles like Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony Corp's Playstation4 are expected to launch in coming months. Investors hope the advent of new gaming hardware will give the video game industry a shot in the arm.

GameStop raised the lower end of its full-year earnings forecast to $2.90 to $3.15 per share, from $2.75 to $3.15 per share previously.

"The expectations are that we're going to have a tough first half until we see titles like Grand Theft Auto and new consoles," Chief Financial Officer Robert Lloyd told Reuters.

Sony Corp said in February it would release its next-generation PlayStation this year, its first videogame console in seven years. And on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, its first new gaming console in eight years, making its strongest push so far to dominate consumers' living rooms with an array of exclusive media and video game content.

GameStop shares, which have risen about 46 percent in the last three months, were trading flat at $36.20 in the afternoon.

Analysts say there remained confusion over whether Microsoft planned to take a cut on revenue for used games played on the Xbox One, following news reports that suggested the software company may charge used-game users a fee.

"It appears that Microsoft will assign a unique ID to each game disk loaded onto the Xbox, which could require a second user to pay Microsoft a fee to access Xbox services," R. w. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a note on Tuesday.

GameStop executives said they would wait for the software company to communicate that.

"The majority of how the stock is going to trade is going to be the market interpretation of how "Xbox One" is going to handle used-game sales," National Alliance Securities analyst Mike Hickey told Reuters.

Total U.S. sales of videogame hardware and software in April saw a 25 percent drop, following a downward trend that has continued month over month since last year, according to a report by market research firm NPD.

Quarterly profit of the world's largest video games retailer fell to 46 cents per share, but beat analysts' estimates of 40 cents per share.

The company, which said its year-to-date market share of PS3 and Xbox 360 software in the United States was 47.7 percent, reported first-quarter revenue of $1.87 billion. Mobile sales rose 290 percent to $46.8 million.

Analysts on average were expecting sales of $1.82 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Quarterly profit fell to 46 cents per share, but beat analysts' estimates of 40 cents per share.

For the second quarter, GameStop expects earnings of 1 cent per share to 7 cents per share. Analysts are expecting a profit of 8 cents per share.

(Reporting by Chandni Doulatramani in Bangalore and Malathi Nayak in San Francisco; Editing by Roshni Menon and Alden Bentley)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Thanks to commercials for erectile dysfunction drugs, men know to seek medical attention for "erections lasting more than four hours," but a new study suggests a blood disorder is the cause of many prolonged erections.

While the condition - formally known as priapism - is rare, researchers report in The Journal of Urology that between 14 percent and 30 percent of cases that show up in U.S. emergency rooms are men with sickle-cell disease.

"I would say what the paper is telling us is that sickle-cell disease is still responsible for the bulk of the visits for priapism," said Dr. Gregory Broderick, professor of urology at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, who was not involved in the study.

Sickle-cell disease is an inherited disorder that leads to red blood cells containing an abnormal type of hemoglobin. The defective cells frequently take on a sickle- or crescent-shape and can block small blood vessels, which can lead to tissue damage or even stroke.

Especially dangerous for people with the sickle-cell trait is becoming dehydrated, which thickens the blood and can provoke a potentially fatal "sickle-cell crisis."

Other complications of the condition are anemia, jaundice, gallstones, severe leg and arm pain, and spleen, liver and kidney damage.

Previous studies have linked priapism to sickle-cell disease, as well as to illegal drug abuse and use of erectile dysfunction treatments.

To get a better idea of who is most likely to experience priapism, and why, researchers led by the University of Montreal Health Center's Dr. Florian Roghmann analyzed a database of U.S. ER visits between 2006 and 2009.

They found that 32,462 men came to ERs with priapism during that period, which works out to be less than one emergency visit per 100,000 U.S. men. Of those patients, about 13 percent ended up being admitted to the hospital.

The figures were not significantly different from the past, according to the researchers, which suggests the problem is not becoming more common as the population ages.

About half the men were treated at urban teaching hospitals. And about 14 percent of were reported to have sickle-cell disease, but that number was even higher - about 31 percent - among patients younger than 18 years old. About 4 percent of the patients said they had abused drugs.

The study did not assess how many of the men had used erectile dysfunction drugs. Nor could the researchers tell from the data how many of the ER visits were by the same patients.

But the high proportion of patients identified as having sickle-cell disease, according to Broderick, suggests sickle-cell is the main driver of priapism.

"You're really talking about a demographic slice," said Broderick, who has researched priapism but wasn't involved with the new study.

Sickle-cell disease is most common among people of African, especially West African, descent.

The condition is not thought to cause priapism directly by clogging blood vessels with damaged cells. Rather, it's believed that when the defective red blood cells break, their contents in the bloodstream interfere with signaling from the brain that regulates blood flow and tissue responses, according to Broderick.

The study team also found that priapism is more common during the summer months and in warmer climates. Broderick said that may be due to dehydration among people with sickle-cell disease.

But he cautioned that the new study cannot say for certain what caused priapism in these patients. So the researchers can't rule out other explanations.

Regardless of the cause, Broderick told Reuters Health that the condition can lead to serious long-term complications if it's not treated quickly.

"It's a time-dependant emergency. The more time they've had the ischemic or erect penis, the more likely they're going to have erectile dysfunction," he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/ZQU1Kp The Journal of Urology, online April 10, 2013.