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By providing the most efficient next-generation mobile memory with a very large data capacity, we are now enabling OEMs to introduce even more innovative designs in the marketplace, said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing for Samsung. Our 20nm-class four gigabit mobile DRAM provides another example of our ability to deliver well-differentiated, high-performance, high-density memory to customers in a timely manner.

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Compared to older 30-nanometer class low power DDR3 mobile RAM, the new memory chip improves performance by more than 30% and reduces power consumption by 20%.

Samsung said that it plans to increase production of its 20nm-class mobile memory chip later this year.

This article was

Yet the most likely first-time homeowners, especially young professionals and couples starting families, won't buy these days. Or they can't. Or they already did, during the housing boom. And their absence helps explain why the housing industry is still depressed.

The obstacles range from higher down payments to heavy debt from credit cards and student loans. But even many of those who could afford to buy no longer see it as a wise investment. Prices have sunk 15 percent in three years.

"I've looked for a home, but the places we can afford with the money we have are not that great," says Seth Herter, 23, a store manager in suburban St. Louis. "It also doesn't seem smart anymore to buy with prices falling. Buying a home just doesn't make sense to us."

The proportion of U.S. households that own homes is at 65.1 percent, its lowest point since 1996, the Census Bureau says. That marks a shift after nearly two decades in which homeownership grew before peaking at 70 percent during the housing boom.

The housing bubble lured so many young buyers that it reduced the pool of potential first-timers to below-normal levels. That's contributed to the decline in new buyers in recent years.

In 2005, at the height of the boom, about 2.8 million first-timers bought homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. By contrast, for each of the four years preceding the boom, the number of first-timers averaged fewer than 2 million.

Still, the bigger factors are the struggling economy, shaky job security, tougher credit rules and lack of cash to put down, said Dan McCue, research manager at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. The unemployment rate among typical first-timers, those ages 25 to 34, is 9.8 percent, compared with 9 percent for all adults.

"The obstacles facing first-time buyers are big, and it's changing the way they look at home ownership," McCue says. "It's no longer the American Dream for the younger generation."

First-timers usually account for up to half of all sales. Over the past year, they've accounted for only about a third.

A big reason is tougher lending standards.

Lenders are demanding more money up front. In 2002, the median down payment for a single-family home in nine major U.S. cities was 4 percent, according to real estate website Zillow.com. Today, it's 22 percent.

And one-third of households have credit scores too low to qualify for a mortgage. The median required credit score from FICO Inc., the industry leader in credit ratings, has risen from 720 in 2007, when the market went bust, to 760 today.

Homes in many places are the most affordable in a generation. In the past year, the national median sale price has sunk 3.5 percent. Half the homes listed in the Tampa Bay area are priced below $100,000.

The average mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed loan is 4 percent, barely above an all-time low. Five years ago, it was near 6.5 percent. In 2000, it exceeded 8 percent.

When the economy eventually strengthens, the housing market will, too. More people will be hired. Confidence will rise. Down payments won't be so hard to produce.

The question is whether first-time buyers will then start flowing into the housing market. That will depend mainly on whether they think prices will rise, said Mark Vitner, senior U.S. economist at Wells Fargo.

"It's a guessing game as to when things will turn around," Vitner said. "But until they do, you won't see young people buying homes."

The general's defense lawyer told The Associated Press on Thursday that he has already appealed Wednesday's verdict, saying the evidence was "invented" and calling it unacceptable that his client is being blamed for the crimes of a bygone era.

"This is speculation, 40 years later," Miguel Langon said while visiting Buenos Aires. "A criminal trial is completely different than a historical study. You have to have proof. ... These kinds of generalized statements can serve for a general analysis of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, but against an individual? It just can't be."

Dalmao was a 23-year-old lieutenant in 1974, and was in charge of the jail where Nibia Sabalsagaray, a 24-year-old literature professor and communist activist, was taken from her Montevideo apartment. Hours later, she was dead.

Dalmao claimed she had committed suicide, hanging herself with a handkerchief from an iron peg in the wall that was just 4 inches (10 centimeters) above her head. The military that ran Uruguay from 1973-1985 agreed.

But Judge Dolores Sanchez dismissed the suicide claim, citing physical and psychological autopsies that showed evidence of torture and found that Sabalsagaray was optimistic and combative, not the type to kill herself.

Dalmao won't go to prison soon despite Wednesday's conviction. Now in his mid-60s, he's been hospitalized for months with a heart infection.

Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, the central figure in the trial, was given a one-year prison term for endangering public health on Tuesday.

The case attracted international attention because of the high-profile of some of his clients in Spain and beyond and his claim early in the trial that he treated a host of athletes in sports other than cycling.

However, the judge prompted widespread disbelief and condemnation when she also ordered the evidence, including code-named bags of blood, to be destroyed, rejecting a request for access from anti-doping authorities and dashing hopes that others involved in illegal activity could be identified.

She justified her decision by saying that evidence collected in a criminal investigation could not then be used in an administrative process such as a doping probe by a sporting body as it would infringe the rights of those implicated.

Spain's anti-doping agency (AEA) has said it will appeal, raising the prospect of the case, which has already lasted more than seven years since the initial police raids, dragging on towards September when the decision on the 2020 Games is due.

"The bid will be affected by both the good and the bad but we cannot be made responsible now for Operation Puerto," Blanco, who is also the president of Spain's Olympic Committee (COE), said in an interview with As sports daily published on Friday.

"We cannot correct the past but we can the future and that is our concrete commitment, nobody can doubt that," he added.

"The problem is that Operation Puerto has been a mistake and a disaster for Spanish sport from the start.

"The legal process has a timescale that is not the same as that in sport, where you have to decide things immediately.

"Now there will be appeals and the case will continue to drag on. It has been seven years already and that's a whole career for many athletes."

OTHER SPORTS

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) also voiced its disappointment with the judge's decision to destroy the evidence and said it is considering an appeal.

WADA, the AEA, the Spanish cycling federation (RFEC), the International Cycling Union (UCI) and the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) were all represented in the three-month trial in Madrid.

Fuentes, who denied doping, said in his opening testimony that he had clients in cycling but also in sports including soccer, tennis, athletics and boxing.

He offered to name them in court but the judge ruled that would have infringed the rights of those implicated.

"The verdict does not help the country's image," secretary of state for sport Miguel Cardenal told As on Friday.

"We will continue to devote all our efforts to find out these names and we will continue to explain that the outcome of a trial is one thing and another is our commitment as a nation," he added.

"They need to see that we are in the same boat in the fight against doping and that we feel the same frustration and the same disappointment."

Spanish tennis player Rafa Nadal, the world number five, added his voice to the criticism of the verdict on Friday, saying "the only people who benefited were the cheats".

"With something that damages the image of sport so severely, the ones who are affected are us the Spanish athletes and sport in general," he told a promotional event in Madrid.

"I think the best thing that could happen is that we stop talking about the issue."

Madrid is competing with Istanbul and Tokyo for the 2020 Games and International Olympic Committee (IOC) members are due to vote on the bids at a meeting in Buenos Aires in September.

(Reporting by Iain Rogers, editing by Martyn Herman)

The White House is also announcing that Vice President Joe Biden will travel next week to Brazil and Colombia. He'll also stop in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago.

Biden says the coming months will include the most active stretch of high-level engagement between the U.S. and Latin America in a long time.

The visits come shortly after Obama traveled to Mexico and Costa Rica. While in the two Spanish-speaking countries, Obama emphasized that the U.S. relationship with Latin and Central America transcends security, immigration and drug-smuggling. He urged the region to move beyond old stereotypes and called for strong economic ties.

"The Keystone pipeline system is clearly within the national interest of the United States," saidofand former acting administrator and deputy administrator of PHMSA. "And based on the available information and plans for construction the completed Keystone system would be the safest pipeline ever built in this country. And looking at all other possible modes of transportation, pipelines represent the best option when it comes to moving large volumes of energy products over great distances."

When completed, Keystone system would deliver more than 1.1 million barrels of oil per day to U.S. refiners; more than the U.S. imports from Venezuela (579,000 bpd) or Saudi Arabia (1.0 mln bpd). The U.S. is already home to more than 2.6 million miles of pipelines providing needed energy resources to every corner of the country every hour of every day.

, former acting administrator McCown outlined several key points to the Members in attendance:

1.The Keystone Pipeline System Has Already Been Largely Approved and Built.

2.Pipelines Are The Safest Form of Transportation, Bar None.

3.Keystone is the Safest Pipeline Ever Proposed & Built.

4.Despite Claims To The Contrary, Oil Sands Crude Is No Different Than Other Conventional Heavy Crude Oils.

5.Canada's Oil Sands Will Continue to be Developed.

6.Environmental Concerns Related to Phase Four Have Already Been Thoroughly Vetted and Addressed.

"From both a safety and NEPA point of view, this has been the most scrutinized, and carefully reviewed pipeline project in our nation's history," McCown said. "I am confident that, if approved, this pipeline will offer a level of protection above what the law requires and I am satisfied this pipeline will improve the security, welfare and safety of our nation as a whole."

For more information on Keystone XL visit

[1] See Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, "Comparison of the Corrosivity of Dilbit and Conventional Crude" September 2011; Battelle Memorial Institute, "Diluted Bitumen-Derived Crude Oil: Relative Pipeline Impacts" July 20, 2012; CEPA & Penspen Integrity, "Dilbit Corrosivity" February 21, 2013.

[2] Id.

[3] Id. See also, Lidiak P, "Diluted Bitumen; What it is, pipeline transportation and impact on pipelines" Presentation to TRB Panel, July, 2012.

SOURCE United Transportation Advisors, LLC

The Plano, Texas, retailer began selling the goods last week under the brand "JCP Everyday."

On Tuesday, the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division, First Department, denied Macy's request for a preliminary injunction blocking sale of the goods while a court battle continues over rights to the products.

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

He says it's difficult to pay for it and that quality control is a challenge.

Obama this year proposed paying for expanded pre-K by nearly doubling the federal tax on cigarettes. He says you get two benefits from the tax: Lower health care costs and improved early education.

Obama says early education shouldn't be an add-on to the U.S. education system, but part of the larger strategy. He says pre-K has the biggest, in his words, "bang for the buck" in improving educational outcomes.

Obama spoke Saturday at an economic development forum in San Jose on the last day of his trip to Costa Rica and Mexico.

But new research finds the financial world doesn't just respond to the Internet; the Internet can also predict what the stock market will do. The research isn't the first to find such online clairvoyance. For example, Google may even be able tobefore doctors can, thanks to people's tendencies to self-diagnose using the search engine. Google searches can also forecast the .

The new study, however, takes the extra step of testing out how well stock-buying would go, using Google search trends as guidance. The result: a pretty nice return.

Googling the markets

University of Warwick Business School researcher Tobias Preis and colleagues had previously found a correlation between the number of Google searches for a company's name and the number of times that company's stock was bought and sold. However, that method couldn't predict a stock's price. []

Now, Preis and his colleagues have turned to broader search trends to try to predict the whole stock market's movements. Using publicly available data on search terms from Google Trends, the researchers tracked 98 terms, many of them finance- or economics-related, such as "debt," "crisis" and "derivatives" from 2004 to 2011. They then compared the searches to the closing prices of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a major stock-market index.

To test whether the terms searched in the week prior to any given closing day could predict the Dow Jones, the researchers invented a pretend investing game. If searches for financial terms went down, they opted to buy stocks and take a "long" position, holding on to the stocks and waiting for their value to go up.

If searches for financial terms went up, the researchers instead chose to "short" the market a strategy that allows buyers to sell stocks they don't own, with the understanding that they will buy the stocks later at a lower price in essence, gambling that thein value.

Worried searchers

The reasoning behind the game was simple. If people get anxious about the stock market, they will likely seek out information on financial issues before trying to dump their stock. Thus, finance-related Google searches should go up before a stock market decline.

That's exactly what the researchers found: An uptick inon finance terms reliably predicted a fall in stock prices.

"Debt" was the most reliable term for predicting market ups and downs, the researchers found. By going long when "debt" searches dropped and shorting the market when "debt" searches rose, the researchers were able to increase their hypothetical portfolio by 326 percent. (In comparison, a constant buy-and-hold strategy yielded just a 16 percent return.)

"Trends to sell on the financial market at lower prices may be preceded by ," the researchers write today (April 25) in the journal Scientific Reports. "During such periods of concern, people may tend to gather more information about the state of the market. It is conceivable that such behavior may have historically been reflected by increased Google Trends search volumes for terms of higher financial relevance."

Nevertheless, the average day-trader might find the strategy tough to implement, Preis said.

"This is something I wouldn't recommend to do without testing this very carefully," Preis told LiveScience. For one thing, markets have a tendency to adapt. If everyone starts using Google search terms to try to game the system, the strategy will become less effective.

For another, the financial terms used by the researchers may no longer be the best predictors of how buyers and sellers are feeling.

"You would need to find a way to identify, on the fly and in real time, what are the emerging topics that are relevant to markets?" Preis said.

The findings are scientifically "truly exciting," Preis said, because they have implications far beyond the stock market. Online chatter could help predict disease spread, civil unrest and political elections, he said. And Google is only the beginning, he added. Wikipedia, for example, provides open-source information on how many people view specific articles hour-by-hour, making the online encyclopedia another potential predictor of stock markets and other real-life behavior.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on and . Follow us , & . Original article on LiveScience.com.