The bill allows abortion if a doctor authorizes it to save a women's life. Opponents say the bill would lead to widespread abortion by also allowing it if a woman threatens suicide.

In a statement Friday, O'Malley said abortion is "a crime against humanity" and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has asked Catholic institutions not to honor officials who promote it. Kenny is set to receive an honorary degree from BC at the May 20 commencement.

O'Malley said that since Boston College hasn't withdrawn its invitation, and Kenny hasn't declined it, "I shall not attend the graduation."

"It is my ardent hope that Boston College will work to redress the confusion, disappointment and harm caused by not adhering to the bishops' directives," he said.

Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn said the school respects O'Malley and regrets he won't attend graduation. "However, we look forward to our commencement and to Prime Minister Kenny's remarks," he said in a statement.

Dunn said Kenny was invited to BC because of his country's historically close relationship with the college and that the school "supports the church's commitment to the life of the unborn."

Kenny has said the bill affirms, rather than weakens, Ireland's general prohibition against abortion.

"Our aim is to protect the lives of women and their unborn babies by clarifying the circumstances in which doctors can intervene where a woman's life is at risk," he said in a May 1 speech.

An email requesting comment was sent to Kenny's office in Dublin on Friday and a voicemail requesting comment was left with an Irish Consulate-General in the U.S. Neither was immediately returned.

Ireland has the toughest abortion restrictions in Europe under an 1861 law that makes it a crime punishable by life in prison.

In 1992, its Supreme Court ruled abortion should be legal only if doctors determine it's needed to save the woman's life. But voters rejected two referendums, in 1992 and 2002, to allow abortion to stop a physical threat to a woman's life, not including suicide.

The latest bill is being debated following last year's death of Savita Halappanavar, who was 17 weeks pregnant when she was hospitalized at the start of a protracted miscarriage. She died of massive organ failure after doctors refused her request for an abortion.

The bill permits a single doctor to authorize an abortion if the woman's life is in immediate danger, requires two doctors' approval if a pregnancy poses a potentially lethal risk and mandates three doctors' approval if the woman is threatening suicide.

O'Malley said the Irish bishops have concluded the bill "represents a dramatic and morally unacceptable change to Irish law."

Last year, another Catholic college in Massachusetts was involved in a similar controversy after the Bishop of Worcester (Mass.) pressured Anna Maria College in Paxton to rescind an invitation to U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy's widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, to deliver its commencement address. Bishop Robert McManus objected to Kennedy's public support for abortion rights and gay marriage.

Kennedy later accepted the Boston College School of Law's invitation to give the keynote address at commencement.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stepping into the debate over who should be screened for lung cancer, a leading medical specialty group issued new guidelines on Tuesday recommending that doctors offer annual low-dose CT (computed tomography) scanning to people whose age and smoking history puts them at significant risk of lung cancer.

That means current smokers aged 55 to 74 with more than 30 pack-years of smoking, or former smokers with that profile who have quit within the last 15 years, said the American College of Chest Physicians.

That was the population in whom the largest-ever lung-cancer-screening study, the National Lung Screening Test, found CT screening cuts deaths from lung cancer.

A pack-year is a measure defined as smoking 20 cigarettes a day for a year or any equivalent, such as two packs a day for six months.

That describes an estimated 7 million people, says chest physician David Midthun of the Mayo Clinic.

The NLST, which studied 53,000 current or former heavy smokers, concluded in 2011 that CT scanning reduced mortality from lung cancer in this high-risk group by 20 percent compared to no screening or to X-rays. CT finds small cancers, which can be cured with surgery, that X-rays cannot.

But other medical groups that have weighed in on annual CT screening for lung cancers cast a wider net. Last year, for instance, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) recommended that people 50 (not 55) or older who have at least 20 (not 30) pack years of smoking plus one additional risk factor, such as having chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or a close relative with lung cancer, also be screened.

Experts are divided on how primary care physicians will implement the recommendations. One concern is that CT screening for lung cancer will proliferate like PSA tests for prostate cancer, which are often given for free in such non-medical settings as sports events.

Marketing for such mass screenings encourage men to get a test that, experts from the American Cancer Society to the American Urological Association now agree, should not be routinely offered to most men, since it leads to biopsies and surgeries that can cause impotence and incontinence but prevents few deaths from prostate cancer.

"Where we have to be wary," said Dr Frank Detterbeck, chief of thoracic surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, who helped develop the screening guidelines for the College of Chest Physicians, "is with entrepreneurs who decide to offer CT screening for free," as some medical centers are already doing.

That may seem like a generous public service, but Detterbeck says there is an "inherent conflict" in taking a loss up front and planning "to make up for it with profits from tests and procedures on things that you find. The problem is that you find a lot of things with screening," but about 97 percent "are nothing. So (free screening) creates pressure to intervene more frequently, whereas doing the right thing dictates that you only intervene when it is really suspicious for cancer."

LEADING KILLER

Lung cancer kills more people in the United States than any other cancer, claiming just under 160,0000 lives each year, more than breast, colon, prostate and pancreatic cancer combined. Only 16 percent of patients live five years after their diagnosis, an indication of how ineffective treatments are.

By the time most patients are diagnosed, the cancer has spread to such organs as the bones and brain. In contrast, early-stage lung cancers "have not metastasized, so surgery is more likely to bring a complete elimination of disease," said Mayo's Midthun.

CT screening is not without risks, however, which is why some experts are concerned about mission creep. Physicians expect worried smokers who fall just outside the new guideline - a 54-year-old with 30 pack-years, for instance - to press their physicians for CT screening, which costs several hundred dollars.

"Requests for CT screening from smokers slightly outside the (chest physicians') new guidelines is an issue we'll face," said Dr Peter Mazzone, a lung specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. "All you can do as a physician is try your very best to stick to the parameters."

Doing otherwise, by offering CT screening to people at lower risk for lung cancer, will find many more suspicious nodules but prevent many fewer lung cancer deaths, tipping the balance toward greater risk than benefit.

"You find a lot of things and most of them are nothing," said Detterbeck.

Nevertheless these can cause worry, additional testing and an invasive biopsy, which is often done via a long needle inserted through the chest wall. Another risk is that CT itself can itself cause lung or breast cancer.

On the benefit side, the NLST found that the number of high-risk smokers who had to be screened with CT to save one person from dying of lung cancer was 320. This compares to 780 women who need to get a screening mammogram for one to be saved from dying of breast cancer.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Her son Peter H. David was quoted as telling The Deanna Durbin Society newsletter that the actress died "a few days ago", thanking her admirers for respecting her privacy. No other details were given.

The actress was born Edna Mae Durbin in Winnipeg, Canada, but moved to California with her British-born parents when she was young. She broke into the movies in 1936, aged 14, when she appeared in "Every Sunday" with Judy Garland, according to her biography on the IMDb film website.

She made her name playing the ideal teenage daughter in "Three Smart Girls" in 1936 and in its profitable follow-up the next year, "One Hundred Men and a Girl", which was credited with saving Universal studios from bankruptcy.

Capitalizing on her fame, Universal cast Durbin in a series of musical movies including "That Certain Age" and "Mad About Music" which made the actress with the sweet soprano voice into one of Hollywood's most popular stars.

Durbin shared a special Juvenile Award with Mickey Rooney at the 1938 Oscars for their "significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth".

At 25, Durbin was the second highest-paid woman in America behind her fellow actress Bette Davis, according to the New York Times, and her fan club ranked as the world's largest during her active years.

But Durbin found fame hard to handle and, despite trying to move on from her image as the perfect daughter with films such as "Christmas Holiday" (1944) and "Lady on a Train" (1945), she walked away from stardom aged about 28.

"I couldn't go on forever being Little Miss Fixit who burst into song," she once said.

From 1949 she stayed out of the limelight, moving to France with her third husband, the French director Charles David. She gave only one interview in the following decades and rejected all offers of a comeback. Her husband died in 1999.

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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Amazon, which opened its Kindle e-book store in China in December, launched its Android app store over the weekend for China users to download both free and paid apps, Amazon China spokesman Billy Huang said on Monday.

Google's official app store only offers free apps in China. Google China declined to comment for this story. Android is Google's open source mobile operating system.

Amazon's app store must compete with hundreds of local rivals offering paid and free apps, some of them pirated, and users often worry about malware when downloading from these sites.

Amazon is the first Western technology company to offer a platform for paid Android apps in China and Huang said the company was working with software developers to increase the number of apps on offer.

Amazon China cornered less than three percent of China's booming 169 billion yuan ($27 billion) business-to-consumer e-commerce market in the fourth quarter last year.

The launch of the app store and the Kindle e-book store in China paves the way for Amazon to offer a range of devices including the standard Kindle e-reader and the Kindle Fire.

Huang declined to comment on the Kindle's release date in China. ($1 = 6.1556 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; editing by Miral Fahmy)

"We had a good start, very active with a lot of chances," the much-traveled former NHL player told reporters. "In the second period, we got some more goals and I think from that point on we controlled the game."

The Slovaks registered 24 of their 37 shots in the first two periods, scoring three goals in the process to take command.

Beaten finalists in 2012, Satan's side scored a further two goals to go 5-0 up in the third. The French pulled two back but never really threatened before Libor Hudacek finished the scoring late on.

With the tournament once again being co-hosted by Finland and Sweden, the Finns had a narrow escape as they overcame Germany 4-3 after overtime. Their co-hosts were not as fortunate, slumping to shock 3-2 defeat by Switzerland in Stockholm.

"That's not how we wanted to start the tournament," Sweden's goaltender Jacob Markstrom told reporters. "It's too bad. It didn't hold up today. We weren't good enough."

In the other game in Stockholm, the Czech Republic beat Belarus 2-0 as Czech goaltender Alexander Salak, who plays in the Sweden's Elitserien for Farjestad, kept a clean sheet on his world championship debut.

Defending champions Russia make their bow on Saturday when they play Latvia, with the United States facing Austria and Canada taking on Denmark.

(Reporting by Phil O'Connor; Editing by Mark Meadows; mark.meadows@thomsonreuters.com; +44 20 7542 7933; Reuters Messaging:; mark.meadows.reuters.com@reuters.net)

The author, who also wrote "The Crow Road" and "Complicity," announced his illness on his website on Wednesday and said he was cancelling all future public engagements.

Banks, 59, said his problems came to light after a visit to his doctor about a sore back. Tests revealed he was not only suffering from jaundice but also cancer in his gall bladder.

"I am officially very poorly ... I have cancer," he wrote, adding he is now on a short honeymoon, after asking his partner Adele Hartley to "become my widow."

Banks, who also writes science fiction under the name of Iain M Banks, said that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient he is only expected to live for several months.

"It's extremely unlikely I'll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, 'The Quarry', will be my last," he added.

Born in Fife, Banks studied at Stirling University before publishing "The Wasp Factory", his first novel, in 1984.

In 2008, he was named one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 in a list compiled by The Times.

(Reporting by Li-mei Hoang, editing by Paul Casciato)

The strange appendages, detailed today (April 9) in the journal Biology Letters, were found on an ancient jawless fish called Euphanerops longaevus that lived around the time that jawless fishes likesplit off from jawed vertebrates, which include everything from sharks to humans.

"What's weird about this organism is that it had a paired anal fin. It's unique no other known fossil or modern fish is known to have that disposition," said study co-author Robert Sansom, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the U.K.

The findings suggest that early in ' history, evolution experimented with a number of wacky body plans, only some of which survived, Sansom told LiveScience. []

Early fish

The Euphanerops fish were 3.9 inches (10 centimeters) long and looked somewhat like modern-day eels. The specimens were unearthed in a fossil bed in Miguasha, Quebec, decades ago, and were stored in collections in the National History Museum in London and the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Miguasha, in Quebec.

Previously, researchers weren't sure exactly what to make of the creatures' weird fins. Some thought the anal appendages might actually have been displaced from another part of the animal's body in the fossilization process.

Early body plan

The researchers weren't convinced of the displacement explanation. By comparing the 3D surfaces of the fossil under a microscope, the team concluded that the fin pair was actually located below the anus on the living creature. Though it's not clear exactly how the fins were used, the fins most likely helped the fish get around, Sansom said.

The fossil dates to a critical period of vertebrate : Jawed and jawless vertebrates diverged roughly around this time. Eventually jawed fish developed paired fins (but not anal fins) that evolved to become arms and legs. In fact, the same .

The discovery changes the view of how fishes were evolving at this time, Sansom said.

"Rather than gradual acquisition of complex characteristics, maybe there was a bit more experimentation and odd acquisitions," he said.

Specialized trait?

The finding of paired anal fins is "beautifully illustrated," said Michael Coates, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the study.

"It might just be the first vestige, it might be some kind of precursor to generating paired fins" that are commonly seen throughout jawed vertebrates, Coates told LiveScience.

But it's also possible they were a specialized trait that only Euphanerops possessed, not reflective of the evolutionary history of jawed vertebrates as a whole, Coates said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter .FollowLiveScience,&. Original article on.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. The 23-year-old has nine goals in 42 games this season.

"Matt is a dynamic young winger that plays with great tenacity at both ends of the ice and we look forward to his continued development and contributions to our hockey club," general manager Jarmo Kekalainen said in a statement.

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The Tampa Bay Lightning signed defenseman Mathieu Roy for the rest of the season.

Roy played in 51 games with the Hamburg Freezers of the German Elite League this season. He led Freezers defensemen with eight goals and was tied for the lead in points. Roy has also played in 65 NHL games with the Lightning, Columbus Blue Jackets and Edmonton Oilers, including four games with Tampa Bay during the 2010-11 season.

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The Nashville Predators recalled forwards Daniel Bang, Kevin Henderson and Austin Watson from their AHL affiliate in Milwaukee for the team's final game of the season.

Bang, 25, has played in Nashville's previous five games and has two points. Henderson, 26, scored a goal in his NHL debut on Friday against the Chicago Blackhawks. The 21-year-old Watson has appeared in five games for Nashville. (Editing by Frank Pingue)