Last year's offensive rookie of the year Thursday again threw in a quadrant of the practice field to fellow rehabbing Redskins Pierre Garcon, Fred Davis, Jordan Reed and Roy Helu as Griffin continued his recovery from Jan. 9 surgery on his right knee.

Griffin says "it's been a journey." The quarterback ran two miles earlier this week for the first time since he was injured. Griffini says while everyone "gets to see the flowers and roses side of it out here throwing and running with a little bounce in your step," he's had "to be patiently aggressive."

In Wisconsin, a utility shuttered its plant last month after it couldn't find a buyer. In Florida and now California utilities decided it was cheaper to close plants rather than spend big money fixing them and risk the uncertainty of safety reviews.

Meanwhile, the low cost of natural gas is discouraging utilizes from spending billions of dollars and lots of time to build nuclear reactors.

New technology allows drillers to extract more gas within the U.S., increasing the supply and pushing down prices. In states were utilities operate as monopolies, they are reluctant to ask their regulators for permission to build enormously expensive nuclear plants or even fix old ones when it so cheap to build gas-fired plants.

In places where utilities sell power into the open market, the low prices don't offset the financial risk of building expensive and time-consuming nuclear plants.

"The world has changed with natural gas prices being so low and so much gas being available for so long," said Mike Haggarty, a senior utility analyst for Moody's Investor Service.

Industry supporters acknowledge the challenging economics but say nuclear power still has long-term possibilities. While the costs to build plants are enormous, once online, the fuel and operating costs are relatively low. And reactors can reliably produce power with little or no carbon emissions, said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group.

Plants fired by gas cost much more to run when prices surge.

"When gas prices are low, that's great," Kerekes said. "But a lot of people don't like to put all their energy eggs in one basket."

On Friday, Southern California Edison announced it would close its San Onofre plant between San Diego and Los Angeles rather than fix damaged equipment that critics said could never be safely replaced. The twin reactors were idled in January 2012 when a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of new tubes that carry radioactive water.

Despite spending more than $500 million on repairs and replacement power, the utility, owned by Edison International, decided to call it quits. It faced safety investigations and regulatory hurdles to restart the plant.

In February, North Carolina-based Duke Energy Corp. decided to close the Crystal River nuclear plant in Florida after workers cracked a concrete containment building during an attempt to upgrade the plant in 2009. The containment building is supposed to prevent a release of radiation in case of an accident. An attempt to fix the problem in 2011 resulted in more cracks.

Despite the shutdown, Duke still wants its customers to reimburse the company for $1.65 billion in plant investments. The utility will use $835 million from an insurance settlement to refund customers who had to pay for backup power.

Even working plants are being scuttled. Dominion Resources Inc. announced in October it would close the Kewaunee Power Station in Wisconsin because it couldn't find a buyer. Dominion CEO Thomas F. Farrell II said the plant's contracts to sell its electricity were ending while wholesale electricity prices are expected to remain low. The company is keeping reactors elsewhere in the country.

"This decision was based purely on economics," Farrell said at the time. "Dominion was not able to move forward with our plan to grow our nuclear fleet in the Midwest to take advantage of economies of scale."

Just a few years back, nuclear industry officials said the time was right for expanding. A more robust economy boosted demand for electricity, natural gas prices were higher, and it seemed Congress might pass legislation restricting the greenhouse gas emissions, a rule that could hurt fossil fuel plants and increase the demand for nuclear power. To further sweeten the pot, the U.S. government adopted tax credits and offered low-cost loans to subsidize construction.

The industry called it a "nuclear renaissance." It was short-lived.

The Great Recession trimmed the demand for electricity as business and consumers cut back, and natural gas prices fell. Several utilities have scrubbed their plans for new plants or delayed them far into the future.

Paul Patterson, a utility analyst for Glenrock Associates LLC, said the idea of a renaissance was "exaggerated to begin with," and low-cost natural gas ended such talk.

Only three nuclear construction projects have moved forward, and they are all under financial pressure.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is finishing a long-mothballed reactor at its Watts Bar plant. Initially budgeted at $2.5 billion, the utility has said finishing the project could cost up to $2 billion more.

Atlanta-based Southern Co. owns a 46 percent share of two new reactors being constructed at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia, a project originally estimated at $14 billion. Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power recently asked regulators to raise its share of the construction budget by $737 million to roughly $6.85 billion.

It may cost more. Georgia Power and the companies designing and building the plant are in a legal fight that may cost the utility more money. Separately, an independent monitor hired by Georgia regulators has warned of additional potential costs.

SCANA Corp. announced this week that it expects its costs to rise by around $200 million and the construction schedule to slip while building two reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in South Carolina.

___

Henry reported from Atlanta and can be reached at http://twitter.com/rhenryAP . AP Energy Writer Jonathan Fahey also contributed to this report from New York.

Scientists have completed initial tests on a new drug for advanced melanoma and report that it yields positive results in treating this type of malignancy. Melanoma is the most serious form of skin cancer.

A research team from UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center completed the initial clinical trial of the Merck drug , according to ScienceDaily. They noted positive effects in 135 patients with advanced melanoma.

The National Cancer Institute estimates that more thanin 2013 after developing melanoma of the skin. Healthcare providers classify melanoma as advanced when the skin cancer has spread from the point of origin to another region of the body. Unfortunately, while treatments can extend the lifespan of a patient with , the disease can't be cured once it has reached that stage, says Cancer Research UK.

The UCLA team reported their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine. They divided patients into three groups and assigned each group a different treatment plan.

Considering all the patients, 38 percent on MK3475 experienced confirmed improvement. Among those on the lowest dose, a quarter had improvement. Of those on the highest, 52 percent improved.

The scientists didn't calculate the average duration of patient response because they removed from the study five subjects with initial responses after their melanoma worsened. So far, the longest response has exceeded a year.

Researchers were encouraged that any side effects were typically mild and easy to manage: fever, fatigue, muscle weakness, loss of skin color, and skin rash. More severe side effects like kidney or lung inflammation affected 13 percent of the subjects.

According to researcher Dr. Antoni Ribas, UCLA professor of medicine, the trial showed that lambrolizumab had the greatest rate of durable responses among any of the drugs tested for melanoma. Experts believe the drug works by reactivating the immune system in an advanced melanoma patient.

Human T cells track and obliterate invading substances responsible for disease and infection. However, the human immune system doesn't typically sense melanoma, which can spread without detection by T cells. Scientists postulate that a protein known as PD-L1 found on the surface of the malignant cells cloaks them from T cells.

MK3475 is actually an antibody that jump-starts the immune system to catch melanoma cells. The researchers believe that after treatment, the immune system somehow remembers melanoma as an invader and keeps on managing it for an extended period.

The outcome of the first trial resulted in more tests of the drug on patients with other types of malignancy, such as lung cancer. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has designated lambrolizumab a . This designation facilitates expediting the development and review of potential new drugs designed to treat serious or life-threatening conditions.

Vonda J. Sines has published thousands of print and online health and medical articles. She specializes in diseases and other conditions that affect the quality of life.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Francois Englert, the Belgian physicist widely tipped to share a Nobel prize this year with Britain's Peter Higgs, said on Tuesday many cosmic mysteries remain despite the discovery of the boson that gave shape to the universe.

And he predicted that new signs of the real makeup of the cosmos, and what might lie beyond, should emerge from 2015 when the world's most powerful research machine - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN - goes back into operation.

"Things cannot be as simple as our Standard Model," Englert told Reuters, referring to the draft concept of how the universe works for which the last missing element was provided when the long-sought particle named for Higgs was spotted last year.

"There are so many questions that the model doesn't answer. There must be much, much more. And we look to getting closer to understanding what that is when the data starts emerging from a more powerful LHC," he said.

Englert, 81, spoke during a visit to CERN, the research center near Geneva where discovery of the boson - which with its linked force field made creation of stars and planets possible after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago - was made.

The giant subterranean LHC was shut down in February to be equipped to collide particles at close to the speed of light with twice as much force as during its first three years of operations, crowned with the Higgs' appearance.

Englert's visit, with Belgium's prime minister Elio Di Rupo, came amid discussion among scientists on whether the particle should remain tied to the name of Higgs or also bear a reference to Englert and another Belgian physicist Robert Brout.

THREE RESEARCH EFFORTS

The concept of a particle and field that turned flying matter into mass after the primeval explosion that gave birth to the universe emerged in 1964 - the product of three separate research efforts by six physicists in all.

While Higgs, now 83, worked largely alone, Brout - who died in 2011 - and Englert combined their investigations in Belgium while another team - two Americans, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen and Briton Tom Kibble - worked on the idea in London.

Brout and Englert published a paper on their research at the end of August 1964, and Higgs of the University of Edinburgh issued his own six weeks later, followed by Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble a month after that.

But as interest grew in the idea of what was initially called a "scalar" field and boson, the concept became popularly associated with Higgs. Exactly how this happened has never become clear, although there are several theories.

In Belgium it was dubbed the "Brout-Englert-Higgs" or BEH mechanism, a term used by Englert in a short speech to CERN researchers and students on Tuesday. Belgian newspapers have championed the idea of renaming it that way.

Others, including Hagen himself, have insisted that the work of his London team which was based at the British capital's Imperial College, should be recognized.

The issue has gained spice because it is likely that the Nobel committee will award its annual physics prize this autumn for discovery of the boson - and such an honor can, under current rules, go to no more than three living people.

CERN, and its U.S. counterpart Fermilab near Chicago, decline to take a position, either on the prize or a name change. "One thing is clear, the Nobel people have a helluva problem to resolve," said one senior CERN official.

(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

With Manning's trial heating up in the United States, where he is accused of aiding the enemy by leaking classified material to WikiLeaks, his vocal supporters in Britain and Europe are once again rallying to his side.

While support for the imprisoned soldier may be weak in the U.S., Manning a dual U.S. and British national by virtue of his Welsh mother has a solid band of supporters in Britain.

In countries with few national secrets at stake in the trove of classified documents that Manning unleashed, many have seized upon his case as a focal point for a wide range of human rights issues, from the ethics of waging pre-emptive wars abroad to the protection of individual freedoms on the Internet. Many saw his harsh treatment in a U.S. military prison as a violation of his own human rights.

"Every solder in every nation has a duty to expose war crimes. That's what Bradley Manning did," said Peter Tatchell, a British gay rights activist who has taken part in the "support Manning" movement. "In many ways, Manning is a true patriot because he's sought to uphold the U.S. constitution. Thanks to Bradley, the American people now know the truth."

Manning a 25-year-old former intelligence analyst from Oklahoma who is accused of leaking more than 700,000 U.S. battlefield reports and diplomatic cables has also drawn support from members of the Occupy movement, an international grassroots campaign that has opposed corporate greed.

Naomi Colvin, an Occupy activist who has also rallied for Manning, said peoples' attitudes toward Manning, an openly gay soldier, are more open-minded in Britain than in America.

"It's much less politicized here than in the U.S. It's not really about 'Is Manning a traitor or not?' that's never been the central question here," she said.

Instead, Colvin said she and her fellow activists were more concerned with the rights abuses that Manning exposed and the humiliation he was subjected to in his detention. When the group first started lobbying on Manning's behalf, its focus was on the mistreatment of a U.K. citizen abroad, she said.

Manning's assertion that he was kept in isolation for months and stripped to his underwear every night while in pretrial detention helped build support for him from human rights groups around the world, including from some in the United States.

Still, they face fierce criticism from Americans who side with the prosecutors. U.S. critics argue that Manning did not have the right to publicly release the classified material, and some have called him a traitor for embarrassing the U.S. military and threatening U.S. national security.

Manning admitted in court in February that he had provided a vast number of documents to WikiLeaks.

In London, protesters have held vigils and demonstrations outside the U.S. Embassy to demand better treatment for Manning, most recently on Saturday. More rallies are planned in the coming weeks, Colvin said.

Nathan Fuller, a campaigner for the Support Bradley Manning Network, said from Fort Meade in Maryland that when the group marked Manning's 1,000th day in prison in February, half of its events took place outside the U.S., in countries ranging from Uganda to Australia and Germany.

Backing for Manning has come from an official level, too. In a 2011 report, Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty, a noted human rights investigator, praised Manning for uncovering information about the secret rendition of terror suspects. Marty blasted the "cult of secrecy" in western governments and defended the "fundamental role" that whistleblowers like Manning play in society.

Left-leaning segments of Britain's diverse press have been largely sympathetic to Manning's cause, particularly when compared to media coverage in America.

The Guardian newspaper, which has given the Manning and WikiLeaks cases extensive coverage, said 2,500 of its readers voted in favor of Manning winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 more support than any other candidate received.

On Tuesday, commentators in The Guardian again praised Manning, with one saying he had risked everything to stand up for truth.

It may be easier for the British press, and newspapers in other countries, to be sympathetic to Manning's point of view because the secrets he made public deal with the American military and U.S. diplomats and not their own soldiers and envoys.

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, said American press coverage has been more "uniformly unsympathetic" than press reports from abroad.

"Part of that is the mainstream press here doesn't cover the same ideological turf that it does in the U.K. or elsewhere," he said. "But I'd suspect most of it is the mundane fact it's American interests he's accused of threatening, and thatpeople accused of 'aiding the enemy,' rightly or wrongly, tend not to get the most flattering coverage in their home country."

Tim Price, a British playwright who wrote a sympathetic play about Manning's teenage years in Wales called "The Radicalization of Bradley Manning," said the harsh media coverage in the United States had exposed a blind spot in the U.S. press.

"I think the U.S. media has been unable to make the leap that Bradley might actually be the one soldier defending American ideals and principles and the U.S. military is the party guilty of putting soldiers at risk on a daily basis by waging wars with little idea how to end them," he said.

___

Jill Lawless contributed to this report.

Dozens of tornado warnings were issued across a wide swath of the Midwest, including Oklahoma and Missouri, as a large storm front moved through the region. Nine died and dozens were injured.

Weather service meteorologists said Saturday that crews have to assess the damage before determining whether it was caused by tornadoes or severe thunderstorms. Cars were toppled on an interstate in the Oklahoma City area, and aerial images showed damaged to homes and businesses in the suburbs of St. Louis.

They said they expected to have an estimate by Saturday afternoon.

A cold front will move through the Plains and Midwest today, lessening the chances for severe weather.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Award-winning author James Salter, who completed his last full-length book more than 30 years ago, has released a new novel that chronicles a life drawn from many of his own experiences.

Like Salter, the main character in "All That Is" leaves the military to embark on a literary career. Unlike Salter, Philip Bowman becomes an editor after failing to find work as a writer.

Salter is considered by many one of the best postwar American novelists and short-story writers. His books include "The Hunters," "Burning the Days" and "Dusk and Other Stories," for which he won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1989.

The new book spans several decades and explores Bowman's fleeting personal relationships in a bygone era of independent, clubby publishing houses.

The 87-year-old Salter spoke to Reuters about that literary world, why he wrote the book and his writing process.

Q: How did you come up with the title and what does it signify?

A: It has two meanings and they're not the same meaning but they overlap. One is all that is to life, and the other is all that is in life. They're not exactly the same thing, but I think your understanding shifts between the two without recognizing that they're shifting. Maybe that is the way it is designed, and to the reader, that doesn't make any sense, but that is how it is meant.

Q: Given how much time has passed since your last full-length novel, what made you want to finish it now?

A: I was writing other things ... There was no professional reason. I became interested in it through editors that I knew. In the beginning, I didn't know any editors. My first book was published without any editorial advice. Nobody said you might do this or that, or why don't we see more of this. I merely took the book and published it.

It was not until I began to write a book called "Light Years" that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House and he wound up editing a subsequent book. I got to know him very well personally as well as professionally. And through another editor after him, Robert Gay, I became gradually more interested in their lives and that world of publishing.

They are involved in leisurely things like reading books, having lunch with writers and agents - it is all really beautiful and so I thought I would write something about all of this.

Q: Can you describe the writing process behind this novel?

A: I did spend a lot of time pre-writing. I have three big notebooks as thick as your little finger filled with notes about what might be in this book - people, places, and things. It took a long time to write those and then I was paring away.

Q: The main protagonist, Philip Bowman, has very few serious attachments, whether in material possessions or relationships. What do you hope readers learn from his character?

A: No lesson but I hope they read it with pleasure. The book is the journey of a life. I suppose if you search in it as you do at the end of a course in college, you can come up with several questions. Did he learn from experience? Was he emotionally stunted? Is this an example of the moral degeneration of an era?

None of these questions is that relevant. You are not going to get an answer from the book - the book is what it is. It is meant in a way to give you some idea of the life of an editor in a publishing house - in my view, a very favorable idea. I think it is an admirable and interesting life, and being an editor can be potentially deeply satisfying.

Q: The book finishes without a definitive conclusion. How should readers think about the end of the book?

A: With the last female relationship, he says and thinks certain things regarding her. That, to me, seems to make plain that he anticipates they are going to be together for a long time. The book does not say that precisely but it does say that he wondered if they didn't get married, would they stay together.

Could they possibly have a life such as people have in art? In art, by that, I mean painters and sculptors' lives - that life of art that is superior to ordinary mores and behavior. There are levels of art and writing and they live on a certain level that I think we instinctually envy. That is the level that he said perhaps they would live on.

There is so much implied in this book that if you don't read it with your openness to its implications rather than to its literal text, then I think you would miss what this book is about.

(Editing by Elaine Lies, Patricia Reaney and Matthew Lewis)

Crewmembers flying toand back using traditional chemical thrusters would be exposed to the high radiation levels of deep space for 12 to 17 months. That's simply too long to keep astronauts' radiation doses from fast-moving particles known as galactic cosmic rays within currently acceptable limits, researchers said.

At the same time, they added, improved shielding is needed to help protect deep-space explorers from charged particles blasted out by the sun. (Traditional shielding does little good against cosmic rays.) []

"We need to get there faster to reduce the , but we need to have shielding, local shielding, on board to eliminate the effects of solar particle events," Eddie Semones, spaceflight radiation health officer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told reporters Thursday (May 30). "So it's hand in hand."

(Photo: )

For more than 130 years, lawyers have relied on the Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent rating while searching for their own expert attorneys. Now anyone can make use of this trusted rating by looking up a lawyer's rating on Lawyers.com or martindale.com. The Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent rating is the highest possible rating for an attorney for both ethical standards and legal ability. This rating represents the pinnacle of professional excellence. It is achieved only after an attorney has been reviewed and recommended by their peers - members of the bar and the judiciary. Congratulations go to James J. Morrissey who has achieved the AV Preeminent Rating from Martindale-Hubbell.

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Contact Information:James J. MorrisseyPhone: 212-779-2995Email Address: Website:

SOURCE American Registry

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Los Angeles Kings are taking a much more tension-filled route toward the Stanley Cup finals this year than the squad that came out of nowhere in 2012 to steamroll their way to a maiden championship.

The Kings survived Tuesday's do-or-die Game Seven by holding off the visiting San Jose Sharks in a 2-1 nail-biter that put Los Angeles back in the Western Conference finals for a second consecutive year.

It was the kind of challenge the Kings never faced during their remarkable 2012 playoff run when they practically breezed to the Cup title as an eighth seed that grabbed a 3-0 lead in each best-of-seven series and went 16-4 in the postseason.

The Kings never faced an elimination game during last year's remarkable run, yet this year's squad seems to be enjoying their current march just as much even though they fell behind early in the opening round before being pushed to the limit by San Jose in the second round.

"Our backs were against the wall, it's us or them, and that's what hockey players like," veteran wing Justin Williams told reporters after scoring both goals in the Kings' victory, giving him nine points in four career Game Sevens.

"(You want) a chance to show up for your team when it's do or die. We have confidence, I guess knowing that we've been there before."

Williams embodies some of the team's toughness that may have been overlooked during the last campaign when everything seemed to come easily.

The 31-year-old Williams has dealt with several injuries over the years and was mired in an eight-game goal drought before coming through with the season on the line.

Then there is goaltender Jonathan Quick, last year's Conn Smythe Trophy winner as most valuable player of the playoffs, who is further spreading his reputation by thriving through more adversity in these playoffs.

The Kings fell behind 2-0 in their best-of-seven first-round series against St. Louis before their netminder kicked things into another gear.

Quick has three shutouts during the playoffs, and his 25-save effort in the decider against the Sharks was worthy of a highlight reel.

When asked what made the difference in the Kings' tight series against San Jose, Los Angeles center Anze Kopitar got straight to the point.

"Our goaltender," he said. "He pulled some saves off that kept us in the lead."

Added San Joe Sharks coach Todd McLellan: "We couldn't find a way to get another puck by Quick. Trust me, it wasn't because we weren't bearing down."

Los Angeles has certainly been bearing down at their home Staples Center - another distinct difference between the 2012 run - where they have now won 14 consecutive games, including seven straight in the playoffs.

A year ago, the Kings were road warriors as they set an NHL record by winning their first 10 post-games away from home.

Nothing appears the same for the fifth-seeded Kings, except for their confidence level as they pursue a second straight championship banner.

"The way we're built, we've been together and have dealt with adversity," said winger Dustin Brown, whose Kings await the winner of Wednesday's Game Seven between Detroit and Chicago.

"We're comfortable."

(Editing by Frank Pingue)