NEW YORK (Reuters) - After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own DNA had been removed.

The result is a harvest of human embryonic stem cells, the seemingly magic cells capable of morphing into any of the 200-plus kinds that make up a person.

The feat, reported on Wednesday in the journal Cell, could re-ignite the field of stem-cell medicine, which has been hobbled by technical challenges as well as ethical issues.

Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The technique announced on Wednesday, by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, uses unfertilized human eggs.

Eliminating the need for human embryos could boost attempts to use stem cells and their progeny to replace cells damaged or destroyed in heart disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and other devastating conditions.

But the achievement could also revive fears of reproductive cloning, or producing genetic copies of living (or dead) individuals.

Even before the study was published, a British watchdog group called Human Genetics Alert protested the research.

"Scientists have finally delivered the baby that would-be human cloners have been waiting for: a method for reliably creating cloned human embryos," said Dr. David King, the group's director. "This makes it imperative that we create an international legal ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this research."

Among scientists, however, the accomplishment is being hailed as "a tour de force," as stem cell biologist George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute put it. "This represents an unparalleled achievement. They succeeded where many other groups failed, including mine."

The highest-profile failure was that of biologist Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University in South Korea. In 2005 he and his team made headlines across the globe when they claimed, in the journal Science, that they had created human embryonic stem cells via nuclear transfer, the same technique the Oregon scientists used. Hwang's claim turned out to be a lie, making it one of the most infamous cases of scientific fraud in the last decade.

DOLLY THE SHEEP

If the Oregon achievement holds up and can be replicated by scientists in other labs, it would offer a third, and potentially superior, way of producing embryonic stem cells.

The field of stem cells took off in 1998, when scientists led by Jamie Thomson at the University of Wisconsin announced that they had harvested the cells from days-old human embryos, called blastocysts, obtained from fertility clinics.

The fact that the blastocysts are destroyed when their stem cells are removed ignited a furor from groups that believe life begins at conception. In 2001, President George W. Bush banned federal funding for research that would create more blastocysts, but stem cells already produced from them were fair game.

Those cell lines turned out to be fewer and of poorer quality than scientists had hoped. The next breakthrough came in 2007, when Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University produced human embryonic stem cells in a way that did not require eggs or embryos. He added four genes to adult cells, and the result was like turning back the calendar: The adult cells, which he called induced pluripotent (iPS) cells, showed all the properties of embryonic stem cells, an achievement for which Yamanaka shared last year's Nobel prize in medicine.

"The whole scientific community jumped on the iPS bandwagon," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology.

That turned attention away from a third technique for producing embryonic stem cells: the method that created Dolly the sheep in 1996. Scientists in Scotland had started with a sheep oocyte (egg), removed its DNA and replaced it with DNA from a sheep mammary gland cell. They zapped the egg with electricity to make it grow and divide like a fertilized embryo. No sperm were necessary.

This technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). If the embryo is implanted inside a surrogate mother, as the Dolly team did, the result is reproductive cloning, which has also been done for mice, cows and other animals. But if embryonic development is halted after five days or so, the result is stem cells genetically identical to the donor's - and thus custom-made for therapies to treat degenerative diseases without fear of rejection by the patient's immune system.

The Oregon scientists, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, used a variation of the Dolly technique. They carefully inserted an adult skin cell into a donated human egg whose DNA had been removed. The unfertilized eggs, stimulated by electric pulses to start dividing, developed to about the 150-cell stage.

The cells were all true embryonic stem cells; they have the "ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells," said Mitalipov. "While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine."

ODD EGGS

In succeeding with humans, the Oregon team toppled the dogma that there is something odd about human eggs or embryos, said stem cell expert Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Published data said there was a difference in principle between humans and the mice and other animals that had been cloned, a difference that presented an insurmountable barrier to human cloning" for either reproduction or stem cells.

The Oregon team figured out how to get the egg to act as if it had been fertilized. The secret was to keep the eggs in the phase of their growth cycle called "metaphase," which is when DNA aligns in the middle of the cell before the cell divides. The scientists got the best results when they grew the eggs in a little of a substance that tends to be abundant in labs: caffeine.

When conducting the same experiment with monkeys, the Oregon scientists stopped at the production of stem cells and never implanted the ball of cells into a surrogate mother. Mitalipov said reproductive cloning is "not our focus, nor do we believe our findings might be used by others" to do it with humans.

"Reproductive cloning hasn't been advanced by this new paper," agreed MIT's Jaenisch. "If you implanted these embryos, which would be illegal, I think you would get the same results as in mice: Most of them die at birth, and the others encounter big troubles as they age."

STEM CELL FACE-OFF

Now the question is whether embryonic stem cells produced with the Dolly method would be superior to those created with the turn-back-the-calendar iPS method.

Scientists have already found that iPS cells tend to age prematurely and die. They are also created with cancer-causing genes, which could make them dangerous to use therapeutically.

Another possible advantage of the embryonic stem cells produced by the Dolly method: It takes just days, compared with weeks for iPS cells.

"If you have a patient who needs, that can be an important difference," said Natalie DeWitt of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

On the other hand, the human eggs needed for the Dolly technique are in short supply and hard to obtain, notes MIT's Jaenisch. (The Oregon team paid the women who donated eggs for their time and "discomfort.") Although the Oregon team coaxed stem cells out of every egg they collected from one of the women, other labs might not be so efficient.

If the Dolly technique becomes a reliable source of embryonic stem cells, it might accelerate clinical trials of the cells, which have been slow to get going and disappointing.

In 2011, for instance, biotechnology firm Geron halted a clinical trial that used embryonic stem cells to repair spinal cord injuries and said it was leaving the field.

The most promising human study is ACT's. It is two years into clinical trials using stem cells derived from human embryos to treat two forms of blindness, including macular degeneration, with encouraging results. One patient's vision went from 20/400 to 20/40, said Lanza.

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Douglas Royalty)

SAN JOSE (Reuters) - The regional human rights court for the Americas on Thursday told El Salvador it must let doctors perform an abortion on a woman carrying a seriously deformed fetus that has put her life at risk, but the Central American nation was not bound by the move.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights took the action after El Salvador's Supreme Court issued a ruling on Wednesday rejecting an appeal brought by the 22-year-old woman at the center of the case. She had sought an abortion even though El Salvador banned all types of abortion in 1999.

The woman uses the name "Beatriz" to protect her identity. Her fetus has a serious condition known as anencephaly that results in only partial brain development. Such a fetus has little or no chance of surviving after birth.

Beatriz, meanwhile, suffers from lupus and kidney problems, posing a grave threat to her own health.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica, said El Salvador needs to take urgent action to protect the life of Beatriz. That means performing an abortion, a spokeswoman for the court said.

It has asked El Salvador's government to comply with its nonbinding resolution before June 8. The court does not have the power to take steps against member countries such as El Salvador.

The case has brought new attention to El Salvador's strict abortion laws. Women found guilty of having an abortion in El Salvador face lengthy jail sentences.

VIEWS ON ABORTION

Attitudes in Latin America, a predominantly Roman Catholic region, are slowly changing toward abortion with some countries such as Colombia relaxing their rules in order to permit abortions in the case of rape.

Beatriz, who is 26 weeks pregnant, had asked El Salvador's top court to approve the abortion. But in a 4-1 ruling, the court refused her request.

"The rights of the mother cannot be privileged over those of the unborn child," the court said in its decision, arguing "the Constitution protects human life from the point of conception."

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is part of the rights framework for the 35 members of the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS).

El Salvador is among the countries that have signed the organization's American Convention on Human Rights.

Article 4 of that convention, entitled the "Right to Life," states: "Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life."

When ratifying the convention, El Salvador said it recognized the competence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights "insofar as this recognition is compatible with the provisions in the Constitution" of El Salvador.

The Latin American nations that permit abortions during normal pregnancies are Uruguay, Cuba and former British colony Guyana. Mexico City's leftist local government decided to allow abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Argentina's Supreme Court ruled last year that all rape victims have the right to a legal abortion, clarifying an ambiguously worded law and reflecting a gradual change in attitudes toward abortion in society.

However, there has been no big push for abortion to be made legal in Argentina, and President Cristina Fernandez has said she does not support legalized abortion.

(Reporting by Nelson Renteria in San Salvador and Isabella Cota in San Jose; Additional reporting by Hilary Burke in Buenos Aires; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Dave Graham and Will Dunham)

Karen Faye is testifying for Jackson's mother in a lawsuit against AEG Live LLC, the promoter of his planned series of comeback concerts.

She says Jackson trusted the advice of doctors to help him sleep and deal with pain from injuries and performances.

Faye says during the "Dangerous" tour, promoters asked that she give Jackson injections of pain medications, but she refused. She says a tour manager who later became a top AEG executive then enlisted a doctor to treat Jackson.

Jackson's mother is suing AEG claiming it didn't properly investigate the doctor convicted of causing Jackson's death. AEG denies wrongdoing.

The five singers told a press conference in London that their new album, which the music press speculated would share the same name as their upcoming "Where We Are" 2014 tour, will depart from the teen pop that has had young girls screaming around the world since they first emerged from a talent show.

"The answer is yes, there will be a new album and yeah, I think it's taking a slightly rockier tone to it," One Direction's Louis Tomlinson told reporters on Thursday before handing over to bandmate Liam Payne to expand.

Payne said the group, which also includes Niall Horan, Zayn Malik and Harry Styles, helped out with the songwriting on the new album, but did not mention a release date.

"We've written a lot of the songs, which is nice this time," Payne said. "We've just made it a bit more edgy I suppose."

One Direction, whose members are aged in their late teens and early 20s, have sold 14 million singles in the two years since their debut album "Up All Night".

They will start their tour on April 25, 2014 in Bogota, Colombia.

"It's not just the same tour going round again in stadiums," Styles said. "It's gonna be a much bigger show."

The group have confirmed 13 dates in Latin America, Ireland and Britain, with more to come.

One Direction shot to fame on "The X Factor" television singing competition and have conquered the global market with two albums and a string of catchy hit singles.

The band topped the Billboard 200 album chart twice last year with "Up All Night" and their second album "Take Me Home". They were named Billboard's top new artist/group in 2012.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday his chamber would chart its own path on immigration rather than simply considering a Senate-passed measure, quashing hopes some Democrats had for quickly enacting the landmark legislation.

"While we applaud the progress made by our Senate colleagues, there are numerous ways in which the House will approach the issue differently," Boehner said in a statement.

"We will not simply take up and accept the bill that is emerging in the Senate if it passes," he added.

The full Senate is expected to start debating an immigration bill next month that aims to lift the threat of deportation for 11 million illegal immigrants and put most of them on a 13-year path to citizenship. Senate leaders hope to hold a vote on the bill by the end of June.

It is unclear if enough House Republicans will embrace the path to citizenship, which many of them call "amnesty" for those who came to the United States illegally or overstayed visas.

The Senate measure got a boost this week when its Judiciary Committee, in a bipartisan 13-5 vote, approved the measure that would also strengthen border security and revamp visas for foreigners.

With a group of House negotiators unable so far to produce a bipartisan bill to present to the full House, some Democrats, including No. 2-ranking Representative Steny Hoyer, have suggested the possibility of just taking up the bill the Senate passes this summer.

The Republican-controlled House, which is more conservative than the Democratic-held Senate, is expected to have a tougher time passing an immigration bill this year, even with broad popular support for reform and the growing political clout of Hispanic-Americans, who voted heavily for Democrats in last year's election.

That was evident on Thursday as the eight Republican and Democratic House negotiators met privately for about an hour.

Four years into their negotiations, the group again failed to seal a deal, despite proclamations from some of them last week that an agreement in principle had been reached.

Nor did the group break apart, as some of them had threatened if there were no deal by Thursday. They hope over the next week or so to write legislation that defines what steps newly legalized immigrants would have to take to ensure they do not use any government resources to help cover their healthcare costs - a key Republican demand.

A SMILE, NOT A FROWN

One of the negotiators, Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of California told Reuters the language on healthcare still must be drafted. "I think we agreed not to make comments at this point," she said, adding, "But I have a smile, not a frown, on my face."

If the House is not able to settle on a comprehensive immigration bill, Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte has vowed to push ahead with a series of individual bills that could become the basis for negotiations with the Senate on final legislation.

Goodlatte unveiled one of those bills on Thursday. It would increase the number of H-1B visas for high-skilled foreign workers, one of the many immigration bills Republican lawmakers have introduced this year.

The bill would increase the number of high-skill visas to 155,000 a year from the current 65,000. It would also double the number of visas for foreign graduates of U.S. universities to 40,000 annually.

The number of high-skill visas is similar to the Senate's immigration bill, which would allow the cap to increase to as much as 180,000 depending on demand and economic needs.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

Sacked army chief Gen. Aronda Nyakairima was appointed minister of internal affairs, effectively cutting his links to the army's chain of command. Some other government officials were also moved around in a sudden shuffle of civilian and military officials.

Police, meanwhile, occupied for the fifth straight day the premises of a Kampala newspaper that had published details of a letter by another army general who asked for an investigation into reports that high-ranking officials opposed to the rise of Museveni's son could be assassinated. In letter late last month to the chief of the internal security service, Gen. David Sejusa Sejusa cited himself, Nyakairima and Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi as among those officials who are at risk of being murdered in the alleged plot.

Police on Monday disabled the Daily Monitor's printing press after forcibly entering its premises to look for evidence against Sejusa, nearly two weeks after the independent newspaper published details of the letter. They cordoned off the premises of with yellow tape Thursday, officially designating it a crime scene. Media watchdogs condemned the attack on press freedom.

Sejusa, who has postponed his journey back home from a trip to London, is wanted for questioning by Ugandan police who have searched his house and arrested four of his aides on unspecified charges.

After Sejusa's letter became public, Nyakairima dismissed it, saying it was divisive and full of opposition propaganda. Karoro Okurut, a spokeswoman for the government, has since said the Sejusa case is "a matter of national security."

Sejusa is a decorated hero of the bush war that brought Museveni to power in 1986, a four-star general with a seat on the army's high command.He is also in charge of the country's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, the reason some in this East African country say his concerns about a purported plot to assassinate people should be taken seriously. Some lawmakers have called for an inquiry.

Rumors that Museveni is grooming his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, as a future president have been fueled in part by Kainerugaba's meteoric rise in the military. Kainerugaba was promoted to the rank of brigadier in changes last year that saw him take full charge of the country's special forces, an elite unit that protects the president and guards national assets such as oil fields. Analysts say Kainerugaba's powerful position in the army has alienated senior army officials including Sejusa and Nyakairima.

Ladislaus Rwakafuuzi, a prominent Ugandan lawyer and political analyst, said the new changes by Museveni are clearly part of the ongoing fallout from discontent over the alleged succession plan.

"In my opinion it is true that the army leadership has been grumbling about its loss of power to the first son," he said.

Journalists at the Daily Monitor there insist they will not reveal who gave them a copy of Sejusa's letter or give a copy to the police.Details of the letter were published May 7. The Daily Monitor says on Twitter that "police have defied the court order directing them to vacate the Monitor Publications premises they seized since Monday. Instead of opening the gates to allow employees to access their offices, police deployed more officers."

Uganda's army code of conduct bars serving army officers from speaking to journalists without official authorization. If the police can prove that Sejusa himself leaked the letter, he could face a court martial. Frank Tumwebaze, a government minister who speaks for Museveni, says Sejusa has "clear presidential ambitions."

Museveni, who says he was born in 1944 but doesn't know the exact date, has held power for nearly three decades. His current term expires in 2016.

"There is a growing sense of urgency about what's going on in the environment," Todd Clear, dean of Rutgers University's School of Criminal Justice, said here at a symposium Tuesday (May 14) on wildlife crime.

A variety of new research projects highlighted during the conference show that poaching and crimes against wildlife do follow patterns seen in other areas of criminology, knowledge that could be used to prevent these misdeeds. Famed Rutgers criminologist Ronald Clarke called on biologists and criminologists to work together to fight poaching and other issues where illegal acts are committed against nature.

As with other crimes, poaching often takes place in certain hotspots where conditions are optimal. Rhinos and elephants, for example, are often shot near watering holes where they predictably return to drink and the poaching of elephants and rhinos is at an all-time high in many areas. Poaching has already pushed , for example. []

Andrew Lemieux, a scientist at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, has outfitted rangers in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park with GPS-enabled cameras that allow them to cheaply document signs of crimes like poaching, setting animal snares or harvesting of firewood. The project, which began earlier this year, will help rangers know where to go to best prevent these illicit activities, he said during his presentation.

'Hot products'

Animals like parrots are also desirable to poachers in the same way certain "hot products" like cellphones and jewels are desirable to thieves. These products can be described by the acronym "CRAVED," which stands for concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable and disposable, Clarke said. Most parrots poached from the , for example, meet these criteria, and are opportunistically plucked from the forest by villagers looking for supplemental income, said Stephen Pires, a Florida International University researcher.

The same goes for fish, which are illegally caught more often when they are CRAVED. Fish found in multiple recipes, a measure of enjoyableness, are nine times more likely to be caught illegally than those less often found in cookbooks, said Gohar Petrossian, a researcher at William Paterson University in New Jersey. There are also 10 ports around the world that account for a large percentage of , she said. In the same way the most crimes occur near a perpetrator's home, the illegal fishing tended to take place near these ports, Petrossian said.

Poverty also plays a large role, said Kenyan scientist andat the conference. In many cases poachers are opportunistic, poaching to supplement their incomes, or merely survive. Throwing money at the problem, like hiring rangers, doesn't necessarily help, Leakey said. Some rangers in East Africa make about $500 per month. If you've got 10 elephant tusks, though, you could make a cool $10,000. It's easy to see how rangers could be bought off, especially if poaching seems like the only viable way to feed one's family, said Leaky, who is the son of famed paleontologist and fossil hunters Louis and Mary Leakey, and himself a paleoanthropologist.

"If you haven't got enough money to see your kid through the next semester of school, and if you can be offered several years worth of income by turning a blind eye who wouldn't?" Leakey said. "Hell, I would if my family were at stake."

Too often Westerners ignore the underlying poverty and assume the people committing these crimes have completely different values, Leakey said. "I think we need to change the idea that if you went to Cambridge or Rutgers, you have a different value set."

Taking aim at poaching

Besides dealing with poverty, Leakey offered two options to fight poaching. First, he advocated building more fences around large reserves a suggestion that was met with some resistance by at least one ecologist at the conference, who questioned Leakey after his talk about the fence's ability to stop elephants. Leakey noted that electrified fences were quite capable of stopping the large animals. In places where they've been installed, he added, sheep herders have come to rely on fences to protect their flock from predators inside the parks meaning they can help both people and animals, he said.

Fenced reserves have helped South Africa prevent more poaching than many of its neighbors, Leakey added (athough even in ). While this takes funding, he said, the problem is not lack of money per se, but a lack of political will.

By making it harder to enter and exit reserves, fences increase both the risks and difficulties involved in poaching, both widely accepted tenets of crime prevention, Clarke said.

The second tool to fight poaching is awareness. One of the main reasons thatand rhinos has shot up in the past few years is due to growing demand in China for ivory and medicinal products (although rhino horns are made of the same material in finger nails and have no curative properties, they are desired for their supposed healing powers in traditional Chinese medicine). But Leakey said that most of these consumers buying , or visiting traditional pharmacies have no idea these animals are dying out. []

Increasing awareness would likely reduce demand for these products. As with other illegal activities, reduced rewards mean reduced crime, Clarke said.

In 1989, when Leakey headed the Kenya Wildlife Service, he came up with the idea to burn 12 tons ofto bring public attention to poaching, which in the late '80s had flared up. The ploy worked, cutting the value of ivory by a factor of 30 and almost single-handedly suppressing elephant poaching for nearly two decades, Clarke said.

Perhaps it's time to do something similar, he said. But as to what exactly that might be, Leakey didn't have any concrete suggestions.

"We need to get youngsters in the conservation world to think outside the box," he said. "Thinking inside the box isn't working... continuing to talk, talk, talk nothing gets done."

Emailor follow him onor. Follow us ,or. Article originally on LiveScience.com.